The big question is: can others learn Michael's amazing skills and improve their sports skills and memory?
Real Estate Developer and golfer Rolly White, age 59, has known Michael for 4 years. In July of 2007 Rolly began practicing the whole brain power skills taught by Michael, including mirror-image handwriting, juggling and bouncing a tennis ball on a sledge hammer with either hand. Since then Rolly's golf handicap, around 15 for the past 30 years, has dropped to a 6 handicap.
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INTERVIEW with Dr. Craig McQueen
In October, writer Gregory S. Walsh had an opportunity to interview Dr. McQueen.
Background
Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Craig McQueen, 68, of Salt Lake City, Utah began practicing Michael's ambidextrous and penmanship skill training methodologies four years ago. Since then he has developed into an ambidextrous tennis player, equally strong with either his right or left hand play.
The interview:
Greg Walsh
Hello, Dr. McQueen. Thank you for taking a few minutes with me today to discuss your knowledge and practice of Michael Lavery’s whole brain theories and skills. Perhaps, we can just start by telling how you met Michael? Let’s just start at the beginning and then what lead you to develop the skills that he teaches
Dr. McQueen
Okay, first of all I’m almost 69 years of age and I’ve always been a tennis player. I’ve played tennis for essentially 45 years. I’m from Utah and in MTRP ranking, which is the rating of all tennis players across the country, I was at one time rated as a 5.0 MTRP rating, which is a pretty high rating in terms of play around here. Then I developed some arthritis in my right elbow about 4 years ago so I had surgery on my right elbow and by the way I’m an orthopedic surgeon. And after I had my elbow surgery I was unable to return to really play tennis right-handed. After that surgery I still had too much pain in my elbow.
So, we go down to the Laguna Beach every summer as a family and I happened to run into Michael Lavery) the art festival in Laguna and he mentioned that he was an ambidextrous tennis player. We got to talking about art and he’s an artist and so I watched him do some artwork and later I purchased some artwork from him. At that time he asked what I knew about brain function. He said most doctors didn’t understand much brain function and being an orthopedic surgeon I’m not really too up on the latest in brain function.
In my career spanning 30 years I’ve taken care of baseball teams including a national baseball team, and triple “A” baseball teams here in Salt Lake. I worked with the United States Figure Skating Association for 20 years and did a lot for figure skating all over the world. I also served in key positions for the University of Utah for 17 years, and have taken care of the high school team and most of that involved all the members in the sports. In all that time I had never thought about the fact that I could play tennis left-handed despite the fact I’ve been around athletes all my life.
So I came home from Laguna Beach at that point and started playing tennis left handed. It didn’t take too long to learn how to hit the ground strokes but it took me approximately 3 years of going out 3 times a week and serving a bucket of tennis balls. At the present time I’m playing at a 4.0 level, just one level below what I was playing right-handed in tournaments and in league tennis. Now I’m serving everything, almost everything left-handed and I can almost serve as well left-handed as I could right-handed. Before all my ground strokes were right handed…but now it’s a combination of left handed and right handed ground strokes. So, I’ve come to the level where I can be competitive again in about a 3 and ½ to 4 year period of time. Also when I’m in my office I write all of my letters left-handed and I’ve done some left-handed writing as Mike prescribes in his whole brain power theories.
I’ve also continued on to do artwork. I do mostly water colors at the present time. And another thing besides tennis and art that Mike and I have in common is that Mike plays the guitar and I’m a classical guitarist which all fits into the ambidexterity side of Mike’s training methodologies. Because we know from brain function that children who learn, particularly boys who learn instruments when they were younger have a better developed right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is bigger in women then it is in men who have not learned music so it actually does have an impact on brain development as well as becoming ambidextrous and also increasing the right hemisphere function of the brain which is very important because most males almost exclusively use their left hemisphere.
So there are a lot of things going on and what is interesting is the recent study is in the orthopedic literature. They have done a study on doctors that are right handed who do total joint replacements, particularly total knee replacements. What they have found is that when you’re doing a right knee you are primarily using the right hand and you are standing on the left side of the table where you are doing your surgery. And then if you go to do a left knee you’re standing on the right side of the table and you’re using your left hand for doing the work. What they found out following a lot of patients is that the right-handed surgeon who worked on the right knee has a better outcome than when working on the left knee. Now that’s kind of disconcerting thinking about the fact that you have a left knee and a right-handed surgeon. The results are not going to be as good. I mean they weren’t bad, but they were significantly, statistically better on the knee when they were using right hand primarily on the left so, there is good evidence to show that surgeons should be trained to become ambidextrous.
So that’s kind of my story about becoming more left-handed. I’m also a fly fisherman and I learned how to cast left-handed because sometimes if you are on the stream and you’re up against a lot of brush on the right hand side you have to cast left-handed. This is another kind of valuable tool where you can become ambidextrous.
I also believe that more importantly, it develops the brain, and develops the male brain better. As Michael proposes it develops the white matter, and some of the other anatomical features of the brain and the body. I personally feel so much better because now with my left side of my body I can now do so many things with it. If I happen to have a stroke, which generally affects the left hemisphere and makes your right hand and right leg be paralyzed you’re in a much better position later on in life if you used your left upper extremity to do other things.
Greg Walsh
Ok, so you started your ambidextrous journey by training the left side about 4 years and this was because of the injury to your right elbow. As I understand it, you went out and you seriously practiced with your left arm as a tennis player and you mentioned you did some writing. What can you tell me about the writing that you did?
Dr. McQueen
Well, upon the suggestion of Michael I did mostly left-handed mirrored-image writing (Da Vinci style) and just regular writing left-handed. I think both of these are important because it helps develop your fine motor skills with the left hand. Also being an artist and having access to my right hemisphere, I can now draw better with my left hand then I can with my right hand.
Until four years ago I hadn’t even thought about doing that. In fact I thought my tennis playing days were over. But now, like I say I have been able in only a few years to come back to play almost at the same level. I’m playing actually at the same level that I was because I had come down from a 5.0 player to a 4.0 player at that time so I’m really back playing the same level tennis in 4 years completely left-handed as I was right handed. And if a person who is in their sixties can do that then we certainly could train children to do that.
And in fact about 4 years ago we did a study up here on young kids… we got a group of them that wanted to learn how to throw in baseball both left-handed and right handed. Some conducted this test for at least 6-months and found out that the parents just did not have enough time to work with the kids and the kids weren’t motivated enough to go out and do the training consistently so we had to abandon the study.
But I think that it will be different in the future. We are now seeing some of these pitchers at the high school and the college level are pitching from both sides. A professional pitcher that can throw either left-handed or right-handed is going to be worth a fortune in the future. He could pitch more in the rotation. If a guy comes up and he’s batting right-handed you could pitch left-handed and if he was batting left-handed you could pitch right handed or whatever you prefer doing. That kind of a pitcher in the future would be really valuable. (See the Pat Venditte story)
Just imagine an ambidextrous quarterback in football. He could roll out the right side, and pass right handed, or roll out the left side and pass left handed.You would have much better quarterback. And then in tennis, I’ve talked to some tennis pros and they also feel if you had someone that could play ambidextrous right-hand side, left-hand side they would have an advantage in tennis over a one-handed player. In fact, I am aware that Nadal, who is number 2 in world, is really right-handed. His parent’s started him playing left-handed and he played totally left-handed. Now he is one of the top ranked tennis players in the world.
Greg Walsh
How long did it take to get a hold of the Mirror-image Writing Technique?
Dr. McQueen
That didn’t take very long. Actually, it’s much easier to write left-handed mirrored then it is to write left-handed the right way. That’s a natural way for the hand to write. In fact, that’s the way Leonardo Da Vinci wrote because he was left-handed. And in the days of the old quill pens they tended to write mirrored because if you did that you didn’t smear the ink as you go. So he did a lot of things mirrored because he was left handed.
Greg Walsh
Now my understanding of Mirror-image Writing is that you start on the right-side of the page and you actually write backwards with your left hand.
Dr. McQueen
That’s correct. Remember, you have to write cursive…you don’t print it. You should write cursive because that is becoming a lost art in the school systems today. I see Mike every year my family goes to Laguna Beach and we talk about these things rather frequently. I bump into him every time I go down there and I know he’s gone from playing tennis ambidextrously to getting into golf. His hammer and golf bouncing skills are pretty amazing. And then the other thing is when you see Mike he’s got the best development in the forearms probably of anybody that I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t lift weights but it’s just his constant practice with the sledge hammers. He does a lot of isometric exercises too and that is what has developed the strength in his forearms.
Being an orthopedic surgeon and being around athletes and everything, he’s pretty remarkable. And his ideas are correct. He’s very knowledgeable about brain function and some of the newer things that are coming out. I don’t think we really fully understand it yet. We are making breakthroughs on how the brain and the body can be trained. In fact, I was just watching on CBS with the National News how all these training camps are coming up now. It’s where they are training children, and they have personal coaches. Parents are paying out a lot of money for the kids to go out and they are training in various aspects of the sport so they can be better and more competitive as athletes. This is the wave of the future and they’re just doing regular training programs for speed, agility and strength and all that. One thing that would be a great addition to the program would be that they also have to become ambidextrous in their sport. That would be something that I think would be really valuable and in fact I understand that one of the reasons that the Russian tennis players are so dominant is that they will go out and some of them practice right handed, and then they will go out with their coaches and practice left-handed.
One thing that it does is allow you to play longer without over using one extremity, and getting shoulder, or elbow problems on one side.
Greg Walsh
As we create various communication pieces around Michael’s theories, we feel it is essentially a revolutionary approach to athletic skill training that encompasses all the various skill practices that Michael says will help with brain development and skill development.
Dr. McQueen
Yes, I think so. Once you get into competitive sports, individual sports… how do you get a little more of an edge? When everybody is the same speed, the same size and all that stuff, then it comes down to your skills. If you have an ambidextrous approach to something you can really psych out our opponent. It’s fun for me because I can still serve right-handed. So sometimes if I really want to psych out my opponent, I’ll hit a few left-handed serves and then go up and if he gets used to that, I’ll serve right handed. It’s a totally different look for him . It’s the opposite direction they are expecting and often times they won’t even notice that I have switched. It’s a real advantage.
And then the other advantage of being ambidextrous is if you’re playing outside and on one side of the court the sun is right in your eyes, you can turn around and serve the other way. So if I get the court I would serve and going right into the sun with my right hand then I can turn around and serve left-handed. And then I can serve wide with my right hand in the duece court and wide with my left hand in the aft court. I’ve had some occasions where I’ve aced in a doubles game the guys on each side by just doing this, by just switching around. So there can be some real advantages in sport that an ambidextrous player would have over other people. I think that any good athlete if he practices enough, could pull it off from either side. And he could be just awesome because of the decreased injury rate that kids would have. Pitchers, they go out and are practicing all year with the same arm. Then I see these young kids get injuries to their growth plates, injuries to their muscle, ligament and tendon structures of their arm from overuse. If they began throwing half the time right-handed and half the time left-handed they wouldn’t have that problem.
I would like to talk about another subject related to the brain. My father died at age 86 he rarely did any writing by hand, and he did very little reading in his latter years. Just before he died they did a brain scan on him and he had significant brain atrophy. However, my mother at the present time is 97, and she still lives alone. She just recently had to give up driving her car because of her eyesight but she was driving her own car. While she has not done mirrored writing, she has done extensive cursive hand writing in journals. She always writes everything down by hand. She loves puzzles or games and she still does some teaching at her church and does a lot of reading and her brain is sharp as yours or mine… and she’s almost a 100 years of age.
We have evidence now that if you exercise your muscles, even at 90-years-old, you can regain strength. The same is true with your brain. If you are exercising your brain you grow new neurons. You grow new connections between them, the more that you are learning. So the overall health benefits these kinds of things do are remarkable. We’re talking about enhancing life, by improving the brain as well as body and that has great value.
I’m really happy because Mike has really had an influence on me. This has been a life altering experience because I would not have learned all of this or done all these things if I hadn’t met him. If you change a few people’s lives for the better because of what they have discovered, that is a big contribution to mankind.
Greg Walsh
Yes that’s a great testimonial. Well Dr. McQueen, I really appreciate your time today and we will be in touch and to keep you posted on all these various projects that Michael and I are putting together. Thank you for your time.
Dr. McQueen
You’re welcome Greg. That sounds great. I’ll be happy to help you in any way I can.
Greg Walsh
All right, thanks so much.