I was wondering what makes a person left handed and why there seem to be so many more right handed people then lefties.
Also, is there a difference in personality traits of lefties and righties? I’ve heard so much about lefties are more artistic
(my first post woohoo)
I’ve heard that some believe that it has something to do with a ‘lost twin’. IE: There where twins in the womb and while in early development, one dies, and the dominant one becomes left handed. Sound like a UL to me though.
My son is left handed or “parly-duket” (As they call it in Scotland and if I spelled it correctly) and he’s a normal kid. He’s actually ambidextrous in some respects as he has learned to use a right-handed mouse but still writes with his left hand.
BTW: Welcome to the SDMB. = )
There has got to be some kind of connection with the hemispheres of the brain.
Are there any neurologists here who can clarify this for me?
p.s. thank you Maximum Override:)
A common view holds that the human brain is divided into analytical and intuitive hemispheres. Remembering that there is a crossover of left hand to right brain and vice versa, the right brain is the area that performs inductive reasoning (as opposed to deductive).
Induction implies the ability to introduce factors that are not necessarily related or pertinent to the immediate subject at hand. This allows someone indulging in such processes to originate novel constellations of thought and mentation more easily than one who is confined to the deductive region of perception.
Such approaches and reasoning methods are more conducive to artistic expression. Much of this is confused by the introduction of the mentative differences between men and women. For the nonce, we shall stick with the brain structures of men. Women tend to be less lateralized than men. What this means is that women do not localize many of their thought process in one hemisphere alone. It is for this reason that women are less likely to suffer from aphasia subsequent to a temporal lobe trauma. Men, who are more lateralized, do lose a more significant portion of their speech capacity subsequent to a similar brain injury.
The reduction of distributed processing in the brains of men make it more easy to generalize about the basic functions of the human mind. The speech area of men is located in the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere. What then is the function of the nearly identical structure of the right hemisphere? One is know as Broca’s area and the other is Wernike’s (sp?).
Recent experiments show that schizophrenics hearing voices indicate greater activity in the the right temporal lobe during episodes of such auditory hallucinations. It is also likely that memorization of complex verbal or auditory passages may also utilize these regions of the brain. Commonly, artistic endeavor employs these less used regions in order to rearrange familiar patterns of perception or experience into novel configurations.
Left handed people are literally in uncharted territory as far as large portions of the populace are concerned. It is this unpredictability and strangeness that routinely leave us labeled as odd folk more often than not. Please read “The Evolution of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes for some startling revelations into the machinations of the human mind.
I’m sure this merely muddled things more than clarifying them. Us lefties are good at that.