Jean, I absolutely love your hockey analogy! I find I am one of those people that need to play. I study form by eye through texts and exemplars, dissecting and trying to understand the rules, but I practice very loosely concentrating more on pen skill (not form skill). I do find that as I get more comfortable with the pen, I am starting to shift my attention more towards accuracy and letterforms during practice once again. Although I still play more than anything...it's just that now I find proper form is starting to sneak in on its own accord. My hand is ever so slowly starting to catch up to my mind's eye.
One last, unrelated thing, while the left-right brain dominance theory is still popular in the mainstream, neuroscience research has now moved beyond that idea. It is true that certain brain functions may reside in the left or right hemispheres (e.g., speech in the left), imaging studies (e.g., MRI) show that people don't tend to use one side more than the other. It really is all about the two sides talking efficiently to one another to successfully achieve a task. No one is really right or left brained.
