This morning I held a pen in each hand and wrote the same sentence backward with my left and forward with my right simultaneously, starting at the middle of the page and working out. It was easy and legible (It’s called mirror writing so you have to turn the paper over to see the left-handed backward writing the correct way). Oddly enough, I’ve been writing backward with my left hand since I was a kid, but it never occurred to me to try writing with my right at the same time until Lee Lofland, a former police investigator and the presenter at our Capitol Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime meeting mentioned that he was left handed and could write that way. I’d never even heard of it before.

I had to try it and it worked as if I’d always done it. That made me wonder what else I could do that I’d never tried. This was a hands-on experiment (pun intended) with a big lesson attached.

I couldn’t leave it alone and started searching the Internet for more information. I was elated to discover that I was in good company. Leonardo Da Vinci was a mirror writer! Unfortunately, I kept digging only to find out that it could have something to do with dyslexia or possibly neurological issues of the dubious kind. But that aside, I’m definitely interested in discovering what else I don’t know I can do. Are there skills you didn’t know you had until you somehow managed to try them?

To really mess with some basic truths we’ve all been taught, I recommend watching this TED talk. It opened my mind in a slightly different way.

10 Myths about Psychology Debunked