Re: What Hand Do You Read Braille With?
Yeah I remember another thread about this too.
I only read braille with my right hand, which doesn't seem so common at least on this thread. When I was in middle school, I switched teachers and the new one I got wanted me to practice reading with both hands. She made it very deliberate, which made me even less willing to do it. I think that's why I don't. It was forced on me well after it would've felt natural for me to work on it, and I didn't see the need for it. I still am not quite sure I would need it tbh. I don't read braille enough to need to speed read. As it is, I can read braille at a fairly normal speaking pace I think, though I'm a bit rusty now.
I can totally relate to the feeling backwards thing though. The weird thing is, mentally I know it's not backwards, and physically I can recognize the shapes of the letters even if I read with my left (unpracticed) hand. But for some reason the shapes feel, I dunno, backwards? Inverted? Something, I can't pinpoint it, but it definitely feels like some sort of spatial conflict is going on. F feels like D, J feels like H, stuff like that. I could almost consciously feel my brain going "No, that's not D, check again, really feel the pattern, yeah that's F. Are you sure? Yep. Okay... please let the next letter be an a, or a q, or a g, something that's harder to distort." That was almost a conscious thing like I said, it wasn't quite that vivid but yeah. I powered through it when I was made to practice, but it was tough. Add that to my being insanely out of practice just discerning the dots with that hand in the first place, and yeah. I didn't like it.
I'm still legit curious as to why that backwards feeling was there, like why does my brain have to go through this sort of remapping process to flip the shapes? If my left hand was simply out of practice distinguishing the dots, I probably could've dealt, but the spatial stuff, and having no explanation for it, just drew me away.
I haven't gone out of my way to test this with other things, but when I was bored and messing around, I could play the same melody with either hand on piano, or type on a braille or computer keyboard with either hand individually. I'd never do any of that without good reason, but it was something I could manage. It was insanely awkward and uncoordinated, but I don't remember feeling like my sense of finger space was spinning like that.
I guess it just comes down to the fact that playing piano and typing doesn't require you to sense multiple things under each finger, it requires you to change your hand positions instead, which my brain grew used to early on because of typing and or playing piano as a kid. But when it comes to fine tactile perceptions, the neural paths for each side are going to work a little differently especially when doing something as complex as feeling the shapes and patterns of fine braille dots on a page. UNlike typing, reading braille is more about fine tactile sensation rather than distinguishig finger-sized keys from one another. I guess since I didn't practice that, my brain never learned to deal with it fluently.
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