Hello Again Everyone,
It’s Sunday Sunday Sunday and I am bored, so I am pondering obsure questions I have. This is actually a two part question:
1: Why am I left handed? What exactly made my left hand (and leg for that matter) dominant? Is there something in a specific gene or something in the brain that makes one lefty vs righty?
2: When I was a kid playing baseball (very badly I might add) I threw left handed and wore a left handed glove, but I batted right. Thinking back I believe I did this because everyone else on the team and everyone I knew did it this way. Is this quite common in kids playing baseball?
While genetics plays a part in it, it’s also likely that when you were young and learning to do tasks with your hands, you were encouraged (or at least not actively discuraged) to go ahead and perform those tasks left-handed, rather than being pushed into using your right hand for everything.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I also threw left and batted right, because that’s how I was taught to bat. I also played golf with right handed clubs, because that’s all that were available to me.
Nobody really knows for certain. There definitely seems to be a genetic link, and they have found a gene that makes you significantly more likely to be left handed. However, the gene alone doesn’t completely predict whether you will be left or right handed, so there is definitely more to it that what researchers currently understand…
Left or right handedness is linked to other things as well. In right handed people, the left side of the brain handles language and the right side handles emotions. Lefties are usually opposite of this.
I read an interesting conjecture long ago. I never read where anyone ever commented upon it let alone did any research. Someone suggested researchers should look at the possibility that back in the pre-blastocystic stage the fertilized egg divided and half of it was lost and the surviving half was left handed.
I’m left handed and my father was left handed until he got slapped with a ruler on the back of his hand every time he tried to pick up a pencil with his left hand. He ended up ambidextrous. He said that was actually “handy” for doing electrical work.
That’s less true than is commonly thought. Brain function lateralization in general is not as simple as pop psychology says. And the correlation with handedness is not that strong - something like 70% of left-handers have left hemisphere dominance for language.
There’s also a school of thought that says handedness is a continuum.
I once heard an article that left-handedness can be explained by a mathematical model involving two genes, only one autosomal and both recessive - I think. I probably have the details wrong. I have never been able to find that study.
And plumbing, I imagine. I learned much more than my sisters about DIY because I am left-handed - “Leftie, come here and see if you can reach/hold/move this.”
I don’t believe that for a minute. Every left-handed person I know is strongly left-handed and they all post-date the whacking-the-left-hand-with-a-ruler age. And most righties I know couldn’t even use a paint roller with a left hand. The ones who are dextrous with their left-hands have EXTREMELY good fine motor control, and are still much better with their right hands. I can catch and throw as well either hand, but I do both rather badly.
So, I believe that fine motor control is a continuum, and some people can use their non-dominant hands quite well. I don’t believe that only the profoundly naturally left-handed are functionally left-handed.
However, I do believe that gender attraction is a continuum.
I use my left hand. I really do everything lefty except bat. I tried golf once and ended up doing that righty b/c it felt “weird” doing it lefty. I think b/c everyone I watched and tried to learn from was a righty.
My grandmother was a lefty but converted to righty by the Nuns in school. Same as the above poster, a ruler was effective in quashing the use of the left hand.
Just out of curiosity, how do lefites cope in the Middle Eastern countries that have a thing about left hands?
From my experience as a left handed person, most southpaws can use their right hand much better than a righty can use their left hand. Southpaws can use right handed devices much better than Northpaws can use left handed devices. Watch a right handed person try to use a rifle with a left handed bolt or use a mouse with the left hand. The thing is that most devices that can be set up to prefer one hand will be set up for right handed people. You have to go to special stores if you want a left handed version.
I think you are correct, but I wonder if it’s because we were forced to use right handed appliances, tools, whatever out of neccassity because the left handed version wasn’t availble. By defaut we were forced to use our right hand for many things so it would stand to reason we would be better at using our “other” hand more so than righties.
The one thing I remember more than anything that I hated about being left handed was those damned spiral notebooks we were required to use in middle and high school. When writing the heel of my hand would either always be on top of the spiral OR would be covered in nice layer of pencil ink. Hopefully now they make spiral notebooks for left handed students.
This. I was also quite hypoxic at birth - didn’t somebody posit that lefthandedness is caused by brain damage?
Swinging sports, scissors and jar-opening get right-handed treatment. Racquet sports, throwing, and writing get left-handed treatment. My left hand is much more dexterous, but my right hand/arm is considerably stronger.
Yeah, but that only worked if the paper wasn’t holed for binder use. I did try that, but the teacher told me that “wasn’t the way we do that”. I don’t think she liked me very much. :mad:
I was well into my second bachelor’s degree before I decided to just write on the left page, i.e. the “back” of the sheet. This after decades of working around binder rings and spirals and whatnot.