I know there are folks who are ambidextrous… but in general the vast majhoruity of folks are either right-handed or left-handed.
Does one kidney work better than the other?
Does one lung work better than the other?
A WAG but it takes brain resources to use a hand at peak dexterity. Devoting twice that amount of brainpower just to have peak dexterity in both hands would be only a minimal advantage; you’re better off using those neurons on some other skill.
Practice - only when you do it a lot do you make your brain ‘expert’ at it.
There is one part of the brain that becomes the expert control of your left hand , and its in the right hand side of the brain.
The key point is that the right hand is controlled by a different part of the brain, and its even in the other side of the brain…so being an expert with one hand doesn’t help the other.
also you become expert at coordinating physical activities so any sport or work expertise in the same line may help.
One lung is a lot bigger than the other: the left lung only has two lobes, the right lung has three (although IIRC they’re individually smaller than the left ones). That’s because the heart is taking up part of that space, on the left side. For people with lateral inversion, the heart is on the right and the smaller lung is the right one.
It is very common to have different prescriptions on each eye, or to have different hearing in both ears.
In general the human body is nowhere near geometrically symmetrical, it’s just symmetricalish. That’s before we even start training it.
Prescriptions be damned. Even for people with perfect, “normal” vision, one eye is dominant over the other.
Yes, but there is a lot more people who know their scrips (or their child’s, parent’s or spouse’s) are assymetrical than people who can list their dominances.
What has that got to do with the OP’s question? Knowing is irrelevant. One eye is still dominant whether you know it (most people probably don’t) or not. Furthermore, dominance, whether of hands or eyes, is quite a different thing from differential defectiveness. A person with an injured right hand, may still be right handed. Likewise, a person may be right-eye-dominant and then develop an optical defect in the vision of their right eye (with the left being unaffected, or less affected). In such a case (if the optics remain uncorrected by glasses, or whatever), eye dominance will probably adjust, and the optically superior left eye will become dominant, but I doubt whether this happens instantly, and, anyway, eye dominance is still not the same thing as one eye being optically inferior to the other. Like handedness, eye dominance is a cognitive matter. Differing prescriptions is merely an optical one, more akin to having a scar on your left or right cheek than to handedness.
OK, apparently you and I are reading different questions.
I see questions about “identical” organs which exist on both sides of the human body working differently, you see questions about dominance. I’m adressing the symmetry part, you’re addressing the dominance part.
There was an article on io9 recently about dominant handedness and the whys and wherefores. I got a bit lost when it started talking about language centres, though.
Conclusion: We don’t know.
There’s a feedback loop going on here. Most people have a natural handedness, and using the other hand might natively be only 90 percent as effective. But then they spend their whole life using their most dominant hand, so it gets lots more practice, and of course it becomes “so much better” than the other hand.
I’m right handed, but at some point, maybe twenty years ago, I tried switching to mouse with my left hand. It was hard, and at some point I stopped for a few years, but picked it up again. For a while, if I was doing fine positioning in PowerPoint, I’d have to switch to my right hand. Now I’m ambidextrous, in that one ability, because I practice it all the time.
It didn’t transfer over to anything else, though. I still throw like a three year old with my left hand.
My cousin is a couple of years older than me. She is left-handed by birth, but in school, her teachers made her use her right hand for writing. To this day, she uses her right hand for writing and her left (still dominant) hand for all other activities.
Getting a bit personal, no?
Start that thread.
Joke that’s offensive on several levels:Why did Helen Keller masturbate with one hand?So she could moan with the other one.
My left-handed grandpa grew up in a time/country when all children were forced to use their right hand in school. He’s written with his non-dominant hand his whole life very easily and has no trouble; he actually doesn’t know how to write with his naturally dominant hand. However, in other tasks, he will still use his left hand.
To me, the weird part isn’t that people have a dominant hand (it makes sense to me that it would be better to train one hand really well than to train both hands superfluously). I find it weird that an overwhelming majority of people have a dominant right hand. In dogs and cats apparently (too lazy to look this up, but I swear I read it somewhere), half of the population are left dominant and half are right dominant. Why isn’t it this way for humans?
This is just somebody else’s WAG that I’m passing along, AFAIK; it has something to do with the way one hemisphere of the brain has become specialized for language.
good points. Folks have mentioned that even the organs which come in pairs, they are asymmetrical, as well.
My original question is based on the fact that I am thinking that the difference in the abilities of the left hand and the right hand are quite extreme, not usually seen in these other organs.
Now this is a key point. It underscores the question that “better” needs to be interpreted as “better at what specific task?” and also “how much better?”.
Two cases in point come to mind. One is the discussion in the knives’n’forks thread whereby it appears that many right-handed people (to my surprise) routinely eat with the fork in their left hand, simply because they’ve learned to do it that way – yet it’s a degree of dexterity that I don’t have and as a right-handed fork wielder, I wouldn’t even try. OTOH, I have no problem cutting with my knife in my left hand, and cannot fathom how anyone could regard that as not completely natural!
Also interesting is the cockpit layout of the Airbus, which is controlled by sidesticks. As the name implies, they are a kind of joystick and are located on the outer sides of the pilot seats. Thus, the captain of an Airbus flies the plane with his left hand, while if the co-pilot is flying, his sidestick is to his right. No one has ever felt this to be a problem, and indeed Airbus cited military studies of right-handed pilots flying with their left hands (while presumably firing missiles or shooting at the bad guys with their right) with no issues at all. One might also note that Airbus pilots may sometimes be co-pilots or vice versa, with presumably no issues there, either.
Why do people use their dominant hand to strum guitars and their non-dominant to do the chord work?
and why do people use their dominant hand to pull the trigger on guns and their less dominant hands to hold the gun steady?
Personally, though right-handed, I play air guitar left-handed (and guitar video-games) and air shoot left-handed cause it just seemed natural to use my best hand for the dexterity jobs.
I think it has more to do with what the dominant hand ‘wants’ to do. As other posters have pointed out, both hands are equally capable, its just that the dominant hand seems to get first choice (I also think you underestimate the dexterity necessary for the ‘strumming’ hand). There is a lot of discussion about whether left handed people should learn to play right handed instruments (it makes life easier if you can play other people’s guitars). In fact, many do, although many cannot adapt. Elizabeth Cotten just took a right handed guitar and flipped it around. As far as I know she taught this to herself.
In the case of shooting a rifle, I suspect it has more to do with the dominant eye, but I really don’t know.