Is being a lefty an advantage ? The aforementioned French researches think so. Since right handed folks are a majority, for a Leftie , fighting with a Rightie, would be a predictable thing. Easy. However, for right handed types, fighting suddenly with a left handed warrior would be a surprise factor, and would need some getting used to.
Turns out that murder rates in countries and the proportion of Lefties in their population have a correlation. While one needn't look apprehensively at the next Leftie one meets, consider the fact that amongst the Dioula of Burkina Faso in West Africa, where the murder rate was only 0.013 murders per 1,000 residents each year, they found only 3.4 percent of the population were left-handers. However, studies from the Eipo of Indonesia, show 27 percent of the population is left-handed, and surprise, surprise, there are three murders per 1,000 people each year.
This clearly explains , how despite Darwin, (and I do not know if he was a Leftie), the Lefties manage to survive through. Maybe they are fitter, maybe they just try very hard.
So why do people get born left handed ? Our handedness is controlled by certain pathways in the brain. According to Stanley Coren, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia , any kind of trauma during the gestation or even during birth, can mess up some of these pathways, and affect the handedness factor, as such. Turns out that women above the age of 40 having a baby, are 128 percent more likely to have a left handed baby than those who have babies in their twenties.
Sometimes these birth traumas reflect in the health problems that folks face when they are older, Bill Clinton and George(Sr) H.W. Bush both have histories of birth stress. Clinton suffers from allergies and Bush from Graves' disease (hyperthyroid). In the 1992 U.S. Presidential election, all three major candidates were left-handed. There have been six left-handed presidents: James Garfield, Harry S Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Regan, George Bush, Bill Clinton. Some sources also list Herbert Hoover, but he appears to have been more right than left.
Before the Lefties get all depressed, we need to also mention that Alan Searleman from St Lawrence University, New York found there were more left-handed people with IQ over 140 than right-handed people. You really need to figure out the "handedness of Albert (Einstein), Issac(Newton) and Benjamin (Franklin). ALL Lefties. Wow .
Actually, being a Leftie is not to be restricted to the hands. Some people are complete Lefties, hands, feet , eyes, everything. But most are a mixture like left handed and right footed. For example, when you throw the ball you may be just like the general tightie population, but while writing, you cannot sit on the same bench as a right handed person, without having a shove-shove altercation. Think of which eye you use to look through a keyhole . One eye is always stronger. If you closely watch your friend closely as he /she smiles , it will be clear that one side of the face is almost always more expressive . According to the University of Waterloo in Canada , only 57% of left-handers are also left-eyed !
Lefties sometimes referred to as “southpaws. Possibly originating in baseball, as , given a typical layout of a major league baseball field, a left-handed pitcher would end up facing south as he finished throwing the ball. Some experts say this is actually a term used in wrestling, and may have originated there.
Southpaws or not, and given the plethora of right handed instruments we use, it may be of interest to note that given the standard "qwerty" keyboard, the number of words in English that are typed solely with the left hand is in the neighborhood of 3400. Around 450 words are typed solely with the right hand.
And fancy research apart, there are some everyday things of note.
Left handers who get an interesting mug on their birthday, will never see the picture on the mug ,when they lift it too drink their tea.
A child I know went to hospital to have the appendix removed, and woke up to find an IV in his left arm. he was miserable as he couldn't do any of his drawings while recuperating. he was a Leftie, and the doctor did not know that ....
If you see someone using a spiral bound notebook that is bound at the top, chances are he/she is a Leftie.
A Leftie who had ankle surgery, had some problem with the plate and screws used to align the bone, as the screw was bothering him. The doctor asked him to do "friction massage" using a circular motion. This guy did the massage in the wrong direction being a Leftie and messed up stuff , so that the doctor was constrained to remove the hardware to the save the nerve from the wrong direction massage.
Something as simple as playing cards. If you fan the cards out naturally left-handed, the numbers disappear !
Lefties are very good at visualization of abstract geometric shapes which probably explains why so many creative people are Lefties. Research conducted by Dr Nick Cherbuin from the Australian National University in 2006, indicates that left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport. Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, and fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli.
The aforementioned child mentioned in the beginning of this article , is predictably, in the creative field of architecture , as well as communication about sports.
The DNA , with its helical structure is like a right handed screw. However, several journals , in blatant inattention to scientific veracity and more attention to urgency of publication, actually end up printing a mirror image. Thomas Schneider , a researcher at the NIH, has actually tabulated these happenings , all in prestigious scientific journals, and even maintains a web page on it. In all these a random left handed orientation is given to the DNA spiral.
Probably goes on to show that the editors are predominantly right handed. using only one side of their brain. But on the other hand, this "creativity" in the DNA could be attributed to a Leftie , maybe ? (Researchers , eat your heart out.)
While we learn to live with and wonder about the world of Lefties, two persons called Coulson and Lovett from the University of California at San Diego, actually managed to do research on , believe it or not, "Handedness, hemispheric asymmetries, and joke comprehension! " (Exclamation mark, mine). They actually attached electrodes to 16 Lefties and 16 Righties, and did experiments, subjecting them to jokes . Among other things , they said "Differences may reflect more efficient inter-hemispheric communication in the left-handers, as they are reputed to have relatively larger corpus callosal areas than right-handers. Results support the portrait of more bilateral language representation among left-handers, and suggest language lateralization affects high-level language comprehension tasks such as joke comprehension."
Sure. But of course. That's right. (Or should I say, that's left ?)
It probably means Lefties laugh more.
The fact is, most of these "differences" between right-handed and left-handed people are due to a combination of random statistical fluctuation and publication bias.
The reason is that "handedness" is something that is very easy for researchers to ask about. So they do, routinely. Now, out of numerous studies, in all of which subjects are asked about their preferred hand, some will just happen to show a difference in some variable between the left and right-handed participants. Studies that show a positive result are much more likely to get published than those that don't. This is "publication bias" and it bedevils epidemiology and other forms of research relying on statistics.
The effect is magnified when we move from scientific journals to the mainstream news– which is ONLY interested in research that it can sensationalise (journalists seem to love the idea that someone's whole personality and destiny can be linked to one trivial characteristic). Basically, any research that the public actually gets to hear about will be only a tiny fraction of what's been done in a given field and may well be unrepresentative.
One day both scientists and journalists will get sick of left-handedness and move on to some other minority trait. Then you can expect to hear that studies have "shown" a link between any number of things and having blue eyes or using a MacIntosh. Or maybe they'll go traditional and study attached vs detached earlobes– back in the Victorian age, the former were reliably "proven" to be associated with criminality.
Let's get this straight: the vast majority of left-handers are completely normal people, and are just as healthy as anyone else. As a matter of fact their life expectancy has been pretty well established as being the same as that of right-handed people. There was an infamous study years ago that claimed they die nine years earlier– this was immediately shown to be fatally flawed. Other studies showed either a.) no difference, b.) greater longevity for lefties or c.) only a slightly higher rate of death due to accidents– NOT illness. (This was one of the rare circumstances where studies showing no result actually got published). Unfortunately, despite being thoroughly discredited, the nine year gap figure gets bandied about to this day.
Oh yes... come to think of it, I believe Stanley Coren was one of the authors of the flawed study in question– which is often quoted as a classic example of bad science. Seems he's still pushing his bandwagon. In fact, while left-handedness can occasionally be caused by brain damage, it is usually an hereditary trait. If this is the same guy, he's tried to make his career out of "proving" that left-handedness is actually a defect, whose sufferers are sickly, die early, etc. I wouldn't call him the most unbiased source around.
So what differences are there, REALLY? Well, you right-handers do, in my experience, tend to have slow reactions and limited visual imagination and spatial awareness... Not only that, but most of you seem to have only one effective hand (whereas I'm practically ambidextrous, like I said). And– this is the one that really gets me– you can only read in one direction! I really don't know how you poor guys cope with life... but then many of you seem to have an uncanny grasp of spelling and place value. It must be some consolation to you, given the terrible difficulties you all face. Yes, you dexters are so different and special! Did you know many, many, famous and creative people have been right-handed? I salute you!
Seriously... does anyone really think just one trait can define a person? Everyone is an individual. Not only that, but everyone belongs to a statistical minority in one way or another. Maybe it's the colour of your hair. Maybe it's your ethnicity or your religion. Maybe you're shorter or taller than most. Perhaps you have some minor ailment or other? Whatever it is, whoever you are, the other ninety or ninety-five per cent of the population always has the option of making that one thing the measure of a normal human being. Then they can do studies on you and write well-intentioned articles about how special and different and courageous you and all the other people in the whatever-it-is "community" are.
In fact, someone could be busy researching the difference between "people like you" and "normal people" right now. Nice thought, isn't it?