Their actions are cryptic, their logic elliptic, and we seem to know why. Sort of….
Left-handers are different. Not so much in the way they use their hands as in the distressing way they use, or fail to use, their heads. They are mavericks. Unpredictable. And possibly a little more interesting than the other nine-tenths of the population.
Tony Curtis. The Boston Strangler. —But whatever the number, it’s something that’s built into the brain and nervous system. Handedness is not a choice and babies show a preference right from the time they’re born. Parents who try to effect a change meet with mixed results and sometimes wind up with an ambidextrous child. Interestingly enough, studies of prehistoric sites suggest that our earliest ancestors may have been left-handed and that the switch occurred as language skills developed over many thousands of years.—Read More:http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/look-it-way/200907/are-you-left-handed
Left-handers usually take a certain pride in their handedness, as if it were a badge of membership in an elite group.Lefties have excelled at both ends of the scale – the very good and the very bad. They seem to make exceptional leaders, inventors, artists, musicians and murderers! Any group that includes Jimi Hendrix, Chaplin, Leonard da Vinci, Barack Obama, Ben Franklin, Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler must be select if not elite.
—James Garfield, Herbert Hoover, Henry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were all southpaws.
What makes lefties so electable? Some experts think left-handed people have a greater aptitude for language skills, which may help them craft the rhetoric necessary for political office. And as for the bout of recent left-handed presidents, some think it’s because teachers only recently stopped working to convert lefties to righties at an early age.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1916052_1916054_1915945,00.html #ixzz22m5ALsLp
image:http://www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk/famous/barack-obama.html
Baseball players have traditionally recognized the essential difference. Legendary manager Casey Stengel, a southpaw,once even explained it: “Left-handers have much more enthusiasm for life. They sleep on the wrong side of the bed, and their heads become stagnant on that side.”
Others have been equally sensitive to the psychological vagaries of left-handers, and there is some statistical evidence to back up the assertions that left-handers tend to be more creative and more introverted than righties. But not even a trained eye can always pinpoint a left-hander. A certain frowziness may be involved-a vagrant cowlick, a missing button, an unfocused gaze, inarticulateness, a tendency to mumble. Yes, some aspects of the left handed psyche are universal.
—Applying the survival of the fittest theory[xiv] to the above logically suggests the extinction of the inferior left-hander through natural selection. Instead, we observe their prevalence in society; during the ice age 23% of handprints discovered were the right hand made by left-handers[xv], today despite medical advancement they still form a substantial minority. Perhaps the Left-handers’ secret to survival lies in their outstanding abilities in combat sports[xvi], perfect pitch abilities[xvii], top-notch IQ scores(Mc Manus)[xviii] and intrinsic artistic abilities, aptly described by William Hopkins(Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center)-”The anomaly is left-handed people make up the extremely gifted and the extremely compromised…The rest of us make up the middle ground.” —Read More:http://charlottebplum.hubpages.com/hub/Musical-Musings-of-the-Psychology-Student image:http://filtermagazine.com/index.php/news/entry/look_fender_introduces_exact_replica_of_kurt_cobains_1965_jaguar_guitar/
Allied to the orthography issues is that for poor spelling. Not a spelling “bee” but more an “F” status. Most left-handers spell like half-drunk Elizabethan typesetters, throwing the letters into any sort of jumble.In severe cases, this can be symptomatic of one of the variant forms of dyslexia from which a disproportionate number of left-handers appear to suffer mildly from; and almost half the children in remedial reading courses at one time were left-handed. The only place in the world where they don’t form a clear minority.
ADDENDUM:
In 2007, geneticists identified a gene on chromosome 2, LRRTM1, that seems to be present in most lefties (Molecular Psychiatry, Vol. 12, No. 12). The gene has also been linked to schizophrenia, which fits with earlier research showing that people with schizophrenia are significantly more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous.
Less-lateralized brains may also be linked to lower IQ scores, suggests a study by Corballis, published in Neuropsychologia (Vol. 46, No. 1). The study found that left-handers and right-handers had similar IQ scores, but people who identify as ambidextrous had slightly lower scores, especially in arithmetic, memory and reasoning.
These results dovetail with Corballis’s previous findings that ambidextrous people also rate higher on a “magical ideation” scale, which measures people’s propensity to, for example, think that people on television are talking directly to them or that they can sense when people are talking about them (Laterality, Vol. 7, No. 11).
The link among these three findings—the slight propensity for schizophrenia, lower IQ scores and magical ideation—may suggest that the brain is more likely to encounter faulty neuronal connections when the information it’s processing has to shuttle back and forth between hemispheres, says Corballis.Read More:http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/brain.aspx
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