Question: Why can only some people wright with their left hand and only some people can wright with their right hand but only a few amount of people can wright with both hands? What makes us tell ourselves to wright with either our left or right hand?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

Everyone starts off in life being able to write with both hands! But it’s very hard to keep that up as you grow up, your brain likes getting into habits, and writing with just your left or right hand is a very easy habit to get into. It’s possible to get out of that habit and get good at writing with both hands, but it takes a lot of work because once you’ve picked a side, you feel very awkward writing with the other hand.

We learn from the people around us and pick up the habit of writing with one hand or the other from them. Before you started going to school you’d see your parents or an older brother or sister writing, and might copy them, and your growing brain quickly wires itself to get good at one side or another. It used to be very common when you went to school to be FORCED to write with your right hand (Kids used to be beaten for writing with their left hand because superstitious people thought it was evil!). You don’t often see people writing with both hands, so you sort of think that you SHOULD only be writing with one hand.

So pressure from the society you grow up in is usually responsible. There are a lot more left handed people about these days because nobody’s beating them in school for it any more, so babies watching them will be more likely to favour the left hand as they grow up. Give it another few hundred years and it might balance out, and we might see a lot more ambidextrous people because nobody’s being pressured to use either hand 🙂