Monday, August 28, 2006

Made-up Ambidexterity Test

I was in a meeting earlier, and I came up with a simple way to test your degree of ambidexterity. I totally made this up, so if sucks, you know why.

Ok, let's start with a simple manual activity...

With each hand, start by touching your thumb to your index finger. You will end up with the A-OK sign. Now, for both hands at the same time, switch to a thumb-middle finger connection. Next, switch to a thumb-ring finger connection, and finally, a thumb-pinky connection. You can now repeat this in reverse order going from your pinky back to your index finger.

This is a simple hand exercise that can be done with both hands simultaneously over and over again... forward from index to pinky back to the index back to the pinky, etc.

Now, for the much more challenging ambidextrous part. With your right hand start with the thumb-index finger connection. But, with your left hand start with the thumb-middle finger connection. In lock-step, both hands should work through the exercise described above quickly. With an offset of a single finger-step, it gets to be quite difficult. If you are able to do this just as quickly as you could do it when both hands were producing the same connections, then you're more ambidextrous than most.

Almost everyone I tested, including myself, had a lot of difficulty doing this. Most screw up at some point such that both hands showed the same connections. Give it a try. I assume that those with previous musical instrument training might find this test easier, which makes sense since the mastering of an instrument undoubtedly adds to ambidexterity.

1 comment:

Jorge Monasterio said...

I am going to make a test for total nutballishness: If you have ever come up with an ambidexterity test during a meeting, you pretty much pass the test.

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