I happened to have a conversation with my boyfriend tonight about left-handed people so I though I'd share some interesting facts on left-handedness.
- Identical tweens have 76% of being left-handed
- 7 in 10 people are left-handed
- Left-handedness seems to appear more frequently in groups of people that have conditions like Dyslexia, Down Syndrome, Autism, Mental Retardation etc.
- 60% of American presidents in the last 30 years were left-handed, including G.H.W. Bush, Reagan, Clinton and McCain and Obama appear to be left-handed too.
- In children can be identified by observing which hand is usually close to the mouth.
- Exposure to hi-levels of testosterone could lead to a left-handed child leading to RIGHT temporal lobe dominant.
- Right-handed people process information using 'analysis, which is the method of solving a problem by breaking it down to its pieces and analyzing the pieces one at a time. By contrast, left-handed people process information using 'synthesis', which is the method of solving a problem by looking at the whole and trying to use pattern-matching to solve the problem.
- Chris McManus of University College London (UCL) argues that the proportion of left-handers is rising and left-handed people as a group have historically produced an above-average quota of high achievers. He says that left-handers' brains are structured differently in a way that widens their range of abilities, and the genes that determine left-handedness also govern development of the language centers of the brain. McManus also says that the increase in the 20th century of people identifying as left-handed could produce a corresponding intellectual advance and a leap in the number of mathematical, sporting, or artistic geniuses. (Let's hope so!)
