Ive wanted to ask (myself being a lefty, and curious about this for some time), is there some level of acceptance of left handedness in Muslim nations? You mention you were taught to do things with your right hand; was it like ‘Ok, youre left handed, but youre going to have to learn to use your right for many things’, or was it to an extent an attempt to learn the left handedness out of you? Is it pretty much accepted that some people are left handed, theyre just expected to use their right hand for some things because of the cultural beliefs?
Again, just curious, not trying to use it for any anti-muslim points or anything. Even as late as the early 70s, there were people here who had a hard time with it; my grandpa advocated beating it out of me for my own good, as it was only going to cause me trouble is something wasnt done about it. Ah, the old days.
That provides all the answers I need–your conclusions cannot be trusted. Until and unless you provide cites to peer-reviewed scientific journals, I need not listen to your claims about human biology. Google is not a reputable scientific index. PubMed is.
I find that remark highly offensive.
Life experience by left handed people is not “anecdotical” evidence. It is irrefutable evidence because provided by first hand experience of people living the condition since birth. We know what we talk about because we live what we talk about.
You are the one who is merely “anecdotical” and who tries to sell your emotional assertions.
Salaam. A
Hush, you! I know that most righties think it’s a joke, but you know the rules as well as I do: until the Revolution, it must be kept secret.
I’m left-dominant, but since kindergarten I’ve never felt frustrated: I use right-handed can openers, drive a stick shift, use my mouse with my right hand, and so forth. It doesn’t even occur to me that many products are designed for right-handed people.
All the same, skutir, your claim that people can learn to use either hand is missing the point. Similarly, folks who lose their arms in factory accidents can sometimes learn to drive with their feet, and people who are paralyzed from the neck down can learn to hold a paintbrush in their mouth. Would you say, then, that using your hands for most “manual dexterity” work (put in quotes due to the problematic etymologies) is learned behavior?
Of course not. People whose inherited inclinations are thwarted can sometimes learn to do tasks in an alternate manner, but that doesn’t come close to proving that they don’t have inherited inclinations.
Sure… And miraculousy only affect male babies… What a reveiling “study”.
My mother never saw a scanner when she was pregnant.
She was lefthanded. Her mother never saw any scanner in her whole life.
My grandfather from mother’s side was lefthanded.
I am lefthanded.
My son is lefthanded.
My suggestion on this would be that it is in some way an inherited condition.
My dear family came rather early in my life to the conslusion that I am an excentric lunatic.
My mother and grandfather certainly were not.
They say my son is not as nearly as much lunatical as I am.
Hence I don’t buy the “brain damage” thing even when that “study” would have been done on both male and female babies showing the same results.
Your point is well taken, Daniel. But our environments basically make us “handed” in the first place… what would be a minor differences in behavior (a library search revealed studies of “left-handed” [sic] snakes and horses!) is exaggerated by adapting to our environment of handed tools… to say handedness is a born preference is fine, and the evidence seems to be a shrug, but what I really disagree with is the theory of brain-hemisphere dominance and the host of personality and intelligence qualities it supposedly entails, and I think one way to challenge this is to consider how little handedness is inherint at birth. All there’s evidence for is a slight preference that leads to developing one hand to use certain tools, which tools could usually be used by the other hand if it was taught. If we are not born with the ability to use pencils and forks in either hand but have the ability to learn with either hand, the fact that we chose one and learned with it casts a shadow over how much of our handedness was present at birth. We are talking about the potential to use our hands in socially constructed ways. Perhaps the only thing that makes some people ambidextrous is that they never believed they had to pick a “strong” hand and went ahead and developed both hands.
I can’t speak for others (other families or societies) but I never experienced lack of “acceptance” for me being left handed in nature.
I had the impression that I was taught to use my right hand in certain situations to avoid that I would find myself in a situation where I insulted/acted against such traditions/sensitivities. Especially when dealing with strangers, in public or in private. So I merely was taught to be aware of such situations and this was considered a noraml - because necessary - part of my upbringing.
I was born in 1972. My mother and my grandparents from mother’s side who were Belgian and Catholic, used to reprimand me with: “Give a nice hand” when I wanted to use my left hand to great someone. I always had the impression it had something to do with the Catholic religion since Christians use their right hand to make a cross. Now that I think of it… I still don’t know where the origin of that is…
You need to seperate the various claims you are making. Some may be true, while others are obviously false, yet you lump them all together.
No, that’s not really what you said. You said, “In fact, left-handedness is not even a born trait, contradictory to popular belief. Handedness is learned.” You realize that there’s a big difference between the positive statement “Handedness is learned”, and the passive statement, “there is no evidence the handedness is really inborn”, right? I think you are confusing the statement “nothing definite is known about the genetics of handedness” with your presumption that ‘handedness is not genetic’. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Where are you getting that idea? Certainly not from the article you linked to. The article presents two theories: One, that handedness is genetically determined; and two, that it is determined developmentally before birth. The latter idea is certainly not the predominate one discussed in the article; in fact it is only given one toss-off sentence: “The trait may not even be genetic, but a function of development in the womb.”
But even if we assume that this “womb development” theory is the correct one, and that the “genetic” theory is wrong (although it’s patently absurd to make that assumption in the face of scant evidence either way), you’re STILL wrong. Saying that development in the womb is the equivalent of a “learned” behavior is like saying conjoined twins learned to be conjoined. It’s simply inconsistent with the definition of “learned”.
Your logic is faulty here. The fact that one can learn to use the other hand does not mean one cannot have an innate preference for one over the other. As already pointed out, you could learn to use your feet instead of your hands; it doesn’t mean they are equivalent.
A thought that occurs to me is that if handedness were a learned trait, and given the degree to which society favors right-handedness, how could anyone possibly learn to be left-handed?
The issue is more with it being a child switching hands. There is some evidence that suggests that forcing a child to switch can cause learning problems. In the case of my great-uncle, he had to be held back in school a couple years because of this. Some suggest that forcing a hand switch can even cause stuttering and dyslexia. In the case of a child, why force him to use one hand over the other when he has two perfectly functioning one when it’ll only cause them problems?
From doing reading on the topic for many years, that’s pretty much the conclusion I’ve come to. Is it genetic or learned or a cultural thing? There are facts that support everything while discrediting that any of these could be the true answer. In my case, it’s likely genetic. My grandmother and great-uncle are both left-handed as well as my sister and I. I’ve had other left-handed friends who have had no left-handed relatives at all.
I’m personally more inclined to believe it is genetics than learned though. I’m left-handed, my mom is right-handed and her mom is left-handed. If it was taught why didn’t my mom turn out left-handed or why didn’t I turn out right-handed? Of course, I do admit it’s a possibility that it’s a combonation of all answers. Perhaps some people learn it while with others it is genetic.
Heh, my kindergarten teacher in the mid-80s told me I was going to Hell because I was left-handed.
I hadn’t seen those stories before. Interesting tidbit. I’m sure this it fully possible that these scans could cause changes in the brain that changes the handedness, but it doesn’t necessarily mean left-handedness is a result of brain damage. Perhaps these changes that the scans cause just simulate what occurs naturally in the brain to cause left-handedness. It’s sort of how like some people who have strokes can suddenly develop an accent. That doesn’t mean having an accent is a result of brain damage.
My kindergarten teacher in the mid-80s told me I was going to Hell because I was left-handed.
This (being condemned to Hell) was at a private Catholic school. From what I’ve read, there were some beliefs in the Catholic Church (and probably others), that Satan was associated with the left-hand and therefore left-handed people were influenced by Satan somehow. In fact, there are many references in the Bible to indicating that the left is bad. For instance, many times it was the evil person who was depicted as being on the left side - Satan sat at God’s left-side, Judas was at the left-side during the Final Supper, the criminal crucified to the left of Jesus “hurled insults” at Jesus while the one on the right asked for forgiveness, etc.
Sure, but using tools seems to be an inherited trait as well – or are you thinking of a group of humans that doesn’t use tools and therefore is unfamiliar with the concept of handedness? We’re not adapting to an environment of tool use; rather, we’re tool-users, and so our hand preference is more notable than among, say, horses or rats.
And I don’t think we’re just adapting to an environment of “handed” tools: the archetypal way folks show their handedness is through writing, and pencils are generally not handed. Nor are spoons, forks, mugs, baseballs, or swords. Yet people show their handedness with all of these.
As a left-hander (bet you never guessed, eh?), I’m with you on the skepticism about right-brain/left-brain stuff. It all sounds to me like fuzzy-brained thinking, like the sort of pseudoscience that uses quantum mechanics to prove that reality is wholy subjective. However, you can challenge that based on its own lack of evidence – when you challenge it based on the idea that nobody is strongly handed at birth, you undercut your own case.
Perhaps, but that’s your case to prove. Those of us who are left-handed know from our own experience that we just can’t do things as well with our right hand, and when we were kids, we couldn’t either. Indeed, the history of southpaws in American/British society at least is that folks tried and failed to get left-handed people to use their right hands instead, much to the kids’ detriment.
If you think our experience of the world is so badly mistaken, you’ll need to pull out some strong evidence. Otherwise, I think you’re fighting the wrong battle: strong handedness in some people does not in any way prove the case of those who believe in pop-science right brain/left brain nonsense.
Well skutir still hasn’t answered my question. How does a child born to right handed parents, and whose only sibling is right handed, and has only 1 other relative on both sides through their grandparents generation that was also left handed, LEARN to become left handed. I didn’t choose this because I thought it would make it easier in school, with a lack of scissors, desks, writing tablets. All I want to see if this evidence you have that states, that I learned to become left hand dominant.
With regards to the suggestion that handedness might be a recent development (or exaggerated recently) I’d have to call bullshit. One of the most “handed” activities that exists is throwing, and we’ve been throwing, and with accuracy required, since we’ve been identifiably human, and probably longer than that. We might have more hand tools in our environment today, but our evolutionary environment was one where tool use requiring fine motor control was every bit as vital to survival as it is now.
This strikes me as pure speculation, and speculation that runs contrary to nearly every lefty’s experience to boot. We were all lefties long before which hand we grabbed pencils with was an issue. Hand preference, if it is learned, is learned very, very early in life, and cannot be unlearned. Suggesting that ambidextrous folk are such because they haven’t bought into some societal belief that they had to choose a hand is frankly just boggling. How could you think that? What sort of pressure is there to “pick a strong hand”? None. Insofar as there is any pressure with regards to handedness, it’s strictly pressure to stop favouring the left and use the right instead - though thankfully this isn’t so common these days as it once was. The very fact that switching handedness requires an impetus like losing one’s dominant hand entirely should indicate that it’s certainly not learned behaviour in any normal sense. And the amount of effort that was once* put into converting lefties from their sinister behaviour without lasting success demonstrates a similar point.
I’m all in favour of pointing out that handedness hasn’t a simple or demonstrated genetic source, or that it in fact doesn’t correspond neatly with hemispheric dominance or even in which hemisphere the language centres reside, but calling it “learned” is clearly inconsistent with what we do know.
*For an interesting look into a 19th century opinion of left-handedness, read this story.
Why is handedness as learned my case to prove, and not handedness as inborn? Show me that there are articles proving babies are able to use one hand any better than the other prior to muscle development. I don’t mean “preference,” but ability.
Remember that this thread is about left-handedness as a disability. My original objection to this notion was that humans are fully capable of developing either hand. Ergo, left handedness is not a disability, merely a fact of life for lefties. They’ve developed their left hands and not their right. That’s not a disability. It really is “differently abled” as someone said jokingly.
Why children prefer one hand or the other is not known, but it is nothing like settled that children are born with this fully realized “handedness”. I think of it is as similar to IQ… there may be some genetic/inborn disposition to intelligence, but the belief that IQ is this natural thing that can be learned by testing as opposed to a construct created by the test is ludicrous… as if IQ was discovered rather than invented.
How are can openers right-handed? I’ve never figured out how they’re a problem for other lefties. You hold the handles with your left hand (which takes more strength since you’re forcing them closed), and turn the key with your right. Do righties do something differently, or do some lefties find it hard to turn the key with their right hand? Or do other lefties try to reach over and do the reverse of what I do? I can see that being awkward!
And what do leftie can-openers even look like? I’ve got the idea that they must be “built up” so the key doesn’t hit the can in mid-turn…
My father (born in the late 1940s) was naturally right handed (yes I believe it’s inborn) but his father was determined to have a lefty baseball pitcher, so he was taught (forced) from a young age to hit and throw left handed. Then his brother was born left handed and his dad gave up on him. He’s never felt comfortable using either hand to play sports. He’s a golfer and former baseball enthusiast.
I am pretty predominately right handed but from a young age I tried to learn to write legibly with my left hand (mainly because I thought the word “ambidextrous” was damn cool. I’ve never been able to do it. The only dextrous thing I can do with my left hand is type. I even tried to take up the saxophone and had trouble with the left hand keys.
