People who are left-handed constitute 10-15% of the population. The other 85-90% have often given them a hard time. But new research suggests that lefties are wired in a way that makes them, among other things, quicker thinkers and more creative. And, judging from my left-handed wife, I know it’s true.
Read details after the jump.
From Carolyn Gregoire, How Left-Handed People Think And Feel Differently | The Huffington Post:
Lefties historically have had a tendency to get left behind. Until relatively recently, being left-handed was stigmatized, sometimes as an abnormality or sign of weakness. Left-handed children were forced to learn to write with their right hands, often to their significant disadvantage.
Of course, we now know that there’s nothing wrong with being left-handed. As University of Toledo psychologist Stephen Christman recently explained in Scientific American, there’s almost no evidence to suggest that lefties are at any sort of physical or psychological disadvantage. For one thing, lefties have comprised roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of the general population for many thousands of years. The fact that the trait has remained stable over many generations suggests that left-handedness is not an evolutionary weakness, as many psychologists of the past believed.
But handedness does come with certain physiological and neurological differences. Research remains incomplete, but here are some things we know about the unique cognitive and psychological profiles of the left-handed:
[Keep reading. . .]
Photo by Kuebi = Armin Kübelbeck (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
People who are left-handed constitute 10-15% of the population. The other 85-90% have often given them a hard time. But new research suggests that lefties are wired in a way that makes them, among other things, quicker thinkers and more creative. And, judging from my left-handed wife, I know it’s true.
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