🙋 Handedness

Handedness expresses the lateralized projection of dominance: the body favors one side as its primary mode of acting in the world. All knowledge, Leary emphasizes, arises from the practice of motor skill; the controlling hemisphere shapes not only movement but also perception, language, and thought. Emotional hierarchy (up/down) manifests through bodily lateralization (left/right), with the dominant, or “top,” half taking command of thought. Thought itself is silent speech, constrained by the larynx—the anatomical bottleneck that forces us to think only one syllable at a time—making fine motor skill the root of all symbolic manipulation.