Neuroscience
Our story starts with a wheeze: a schoolboy punished with lines saves time by wielding two pens at once. Exploring the ease with which he can play with writing, what began as a diversion eventually becomes an artistic practice that incorporates mirrored and inverted script into paintings. What can investigation of this skill offer to science?
Mirror writing in Western script flows from right to left, writing first A, then l, e, x to produce xɘlA. It's reported both in neurologically impaired patients and healthy practitioners such as Lewis Carroll, Leonardo da Vinci, and our own case participant, 65-year old "KB".
This phenomenon is no mere curiosity. It challenges popular theory that says we have a mental programme for writing that represents the act step by step, from start to finish; a programme most practised with our dominant hand, but abstract enough to be available by other means. This account has empirical support: when we write from our shoulder to mark a large canvas, some handwriting flourishes are still preserved, and this is true even when we grip a pen with our teeth! The standard theory predicts that writing with our non-dominant hand would be somewhat awkward, and non-dominant mirror writing extremely so: the work of using an unpractised hand compounded by the additional need to remap this high-level recipe.
But the mirror-writing evidence simply doesn't agree. Comparisons of static script produced by right-handed individuals with mirror-writing competence (such as KB, although his handedness is not clear-cut), shows that the closest thing to their normal handwriting (with their dominant hand) isn't normal left-hand, or even mirrored-right, but mirrored left-hand script.
Now a team led by Robert McIntosh have gone further (pdf), using an electronic tablet to record the order, timing and nature of individual strokes of KB's stylus. In terms of accuracy, speed, and similarity of stylus-strokes, they found that KB’s mirrored-left writing is the best match to his natural writing, confirming and strengthening the data to date.
Perhaps KB's mirrored left-hand writing is so assured simply because it's the most practised. To address this, the researchers looked at upside-down writing, a much more recent addition to his repertoire. Left-mirrored was again the best match to right-forward – even though neither look that similar to upright right-forward.
This new investigation with KB supports the idea that writing is not stored as universal coordinates, but instead as movements relative to body position: a capital "A" beginning with an "up and away from the body" pen-stroke. This is why writing with our non-dominant hand is awkward, as every stroke violates these principles, even though its output is "the right way around" perceptually. Indeed, mirror-writers including KB show little fluency or appetite for reading mirrored text, suggesting that motor and perceptual representations of writing are rather different.
KB is part of a small breed - the deliberate mirror-writer - and McIntosh's team are interested in taking this methodology to other populations, both healthy and neurologically impaired, to see whether this vision of mirror-writing is reflected elsewhere.
_________________________________
McIntosh RD, De Lucia N, Della Sala S. (2014) Mirror man: a case of skilled deliberate mirror writing. Cognitive Neuropsychology.
-further reading-
Mirror-writing: Robert D. McIntosh and Sergio Della Sala explore some intriguing phenomena (in The Psychologist magazine).
Your brain unscrambles words in the mirror but then switches them back again.
Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image: Christian Jarrett
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Neuroscience
Mirror writing: What does it reflect about how we all write?
Mirror writing in Western script flows from right to left, writing first A, then l, e, x to produce xɘlA. It's reported both in neurologically impaired patients and healthy practitioners such as Lewis Carroll, Leonardo da Vinci, and our own case participant, 65-year old "KB".
This phenomenon is no mere curiosity. It challenges popular theory that says we have a mental programme for writing that represents the act step by step, from start to finish; a programme most practised with our dominant hand, but abstract enough to be available by other means. This account has empirical support: when we write from our shoulder to mark a large canvas, some handwriting flourishes are still preserved, and this is true even when we grip a pen with our teeth! The standard theory predicts that writing with our non-dominant hand would be somewhat awkward, and non-dominant mirror writing extremely so: the work of using an unpractised hand compounded by the additional need to remap this high-level recipe.
But the mirror-writing evidence simply doesn't agree. Comparisons of static script produced by right-handed individuals with mirror-writing competence (such as KB, although his handedness is not clear-cut), shows that the closest thing to their normal handwriting (with their dominant hand) isn't normal left-hand, or even mirrored-right, but mirrored left-hand script.
Now a team led by Robert McIntosh have gone further (pdf), using an electronic tablet to record the order, timing and nature of individual strokes of KB's stylus. In terms of accuracy, speed, and similarity of stylus-strokes, they found that KB’s mirrored-left writing is the best match to his natural writing, confirming and strengthening the data to date.
Perhaps KB's mirrored left-hand writing is so assured simply because it's the most practised. To address this, the researchers looked at upside-down writing, a much more recent addition to his repertoire. Left-mirrored was again the best match to right-forward – even though neither look that similar to upright right-forward.
This new investigation with KB supports the idea that writing is not stored as universal coordinates, but instead as movements relative to body position: a capital "A" beginning with an "up and away from the body" pen-stroke. This is why writing with our non-dominant hand is awkward, as every stroke violates these principles, even though its output is "the right way around" perceptually. Indeed, mirror-writers including KB show little fluency or appetite for reading mirrored text, suggesting that motor and perceptual representations of writing are rather different.
KB is part of a small breed - the deliberate mirror-writer - and McIntosh's team are interested in taking this methodology to other populations, both healthy and neurologically impaired, to see whether this vision of mirror-writing is reflected elsewhere.
_________________________________
McIntosh RD, De Lucia N, Della Sala S. (2014) Mirror man: a case of skilled deliberate mirror writing. Cognitive Neuropsychology.-further reading-
Mirror-writing: Robert D. McIntosh and Sergio Della Sala explore some intriguing phenomena (in The Psychologist magazine).
Your brain unscrambles words in the mirror but then switches them back again.
Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image: Christian Jarrett
- Your Brain Unscrambles Words In The Mirror But Then Switches Them Back Again
We humans can recognise things from different angles and orientations. As Jon Duñabeitia and his colleagues observe in their new paper, a tiger is still a tiger whether you see it facing rightwards or leftwards. When it comes to words, though, this skill...
- Why Gym Design Is All Wrong
Walk into any gym these days and you're confronted by a bank of exercise machines facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Yet new research suggests this could be the worse possible set-up for sedentary women braving the gym for the first time....
- The Woman Who Sees The World Back To Front
Imagine if your whole world suddenly went back to front, so that the left-hand side of things appeared on the right and vice versa. That's what happened to a 33-year-old woman, known by psychologists as PR, after a pneumonia-induced coma led her to...
- The Woman In The Mirror
Imagine if wherever you looked, you saw a translucent mirror image of yourself, about one metre in front of you. It’s wearing the same clothes as you and if you wave your right hand, it waves back in identical fashion (but with its left hand, just like...
- Mirror Neuron Death March
Above image: Jim Peters almost wins the marathon Vancouver, 7 August 1954, with mirror neurons by Rizzolatti & Craighero (2004). Greg Hickok at Talking Brains has a series of posts dismantling the mirror neuron theory of action understanding. Actually,...