contralateral

I think contralateral wiring helps the brain manage signal sequencing while preserving evolutionary symmetry.

I'm surprised the article and comments haven't mentioned the axial twist hypothesis [0], which IMO is the best explanation I've seen so far for contralateral wiring.

If you're a programmer, needing to train to use the shift key on the contralateral side is a pain -- especially give all the muscle memory that's been trained over the years.

There's a similar phenomenon called contralateral neglect (or one of various other names), where after brain damage to one hemisphere of their brain, a person tends to ignore things on the opposite side.

And once you're doing push-ups you can progress it into the lizard or Spiderman crawl(contralateral motion forward while bringing the body to a lowered push-up position) and engage the legs, hips and shoulders.

I still don't quite understand how one gets from the existence of a decussation between two distinct body-cortex paths to contralateral organization, but maybe after reading the paper I will get it.

True, this is the experiment they did in the original paper: > Eighty-five older individuals [41M/44F, age = 68 ± 4 yr; body mass index (BMI) = 26.4 ± 3.7 kg/m2] had one leg randomly allocated to a single (1)-set and the contralateral leg allocated to four sets of unilateral knee-extension RT at 8-15 repetition maximum (RM) for 10-wk 2 days/wk.

> Eighty-five older individuals [41M/44F, age = 68 ± 4 yr; body mass index (BMI) = 26.4 ± 3.7 kg/m2] had one leg randomly allocated to a single (1)-set and the contralateral leg allocated to four sets of unilateral knee-extension RT at 8-15 repetition maximum (RM) for 10-wk 2 days/wk.

Contralateral neglect is a problem of attention: they can see the things they ignore, they just won't spontaneously pay attention to them.