The case of the lost ampersand

I have noticed a steady decine in my handwriting as I get older. My printing is still very nice, especially when I care, but my cursive writing is getting pretty horrible. It is like my brain is far out in front of my hand. Writing checks can be a bewildering experience with extra humps and loops magically appearing where there once was and should be none.

Yesterday I experienced a frightening cognitive disconnect. I was writing a check out, one of my least favorite experiences, when I found that I had lost the ability to, or memory of how to write a simple ampersand. I have never undergone any experience like it, the failure to write a simple character that I have been inscribing for close to 50 years. I tore open an old bank statement, found an old one and reformed the ampersand and drew the symbol out four or five times, trying to recommit it to muscle memory. It looked faintly odd and wrong but I finally got it back in my cranial mapping cortex.

The next hour I experimented with varying the speed and delivery of my handwriting while I finished up the bulk of the monthly bills. I figured out something that was a bit counterintuitive. Perhaps a neurologist could better explain it. The slower I wrote, the worse my characters got. It was only when I speeded up my  handwriting that I found my old flow and lessoned the number of mistakes I was making.

I leave the event with two thoughts. Perhaps I have had a cognitive brain event or breakdown that I am not aware of? Or an entropic deterioration of my motor system, I don't know. My second thought is that printing and handwriting might inhabit two separate geographic areas of the brain. They certainly require a different host of motor tools and the slower I print, the nicer and more recognizable the letter forms become.

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Last year I was in a shop on the coast and saw a girl working behind a counter writing out a letter, perhaps an a or a d, in the most odd and unusual fashion. I, being a very nosy and curious man, brought her idiosyncratic method for constructing the letter up to her and we had a brief conversation about it.

Fast forward to last month when I ran into her at a party. She had gone to a neurologist and was told that her two hemispheres were not communicating optimally with each other and that my bringing up the odd letter construction had been her impetus to seek counsel. The doctor had got her involved in a program to reintegrate her bicameral brain so that she could be more functional and she was happy to tell me that it was working.

I used to be pretty good juggler. Shawn and Ricardo and I had a pretty nice routine together, Ricardo and I were once in a parade together and performed a lot of passing and stealing. He and I were a natural circuit, perfect positive and negative, where Shawn and I, two yins or two yangs, often found ourselves grabbing for the same ball, a disconnect. Need an opposite charge. Shawn and I managed to work things out okay but I daresay Ricardo and I could pick it up today from where we left off without a blink.

I used to occasionally teach people to juggle. Imagine a line cutting your body in half from head to the tail. The basic move was to make either an inverse or obverse eggbeater motion from the two twin bottoms of a pyramid to the apex centered above. And I can remember meeting people with these hemispheric disconnects that could never solve the simple flow equation, all the balls going in a circle or on the floor or what have you. I spent eight hours patiently trying to break through with my friend D one night in Carlsbad with no success at all. Because he had no left/right brain integration.

I remember getting involved in some of these questions in college, reading about the Stanford split brain experiments. I hope that my momentary amnesia and lousy handwriting are not a sign of a cognitive breakdown to come.

I need to start researching and exploring this field again. If any of you have undergone any similar problems performing rote motor tasks, I would like to hear from you. You will remain anonymous and our conversation will remain confidential.