Once upon a time, left-handers were considered “wrong” and retrained. Then it became almost the opposite: the idea was fixed in the public mind that left-handers are more talented than right-handers. Does it really matter which hand a person has is “main”?
At first, left-handers were considered “wrong”: in many European languages, “left” means “bad.” This is the case not only in Russian colloquial speech, but also, for example, in English, where sinister (“sinister”) goes back to the Latin word, which was written in exactly the same way, but simply meant “left”. In many Muslim countries, it is still considered a conscious insult to give a person an object with the left hand.
Left-handers were retrained to hold a pen and a spoon, sometimes applying severe punishments to them: for example, back in the 15th century, in a number of schools, left-handed children were tied their left hand behind their backs, leaving no choice but to learn to master the “correct” hand perfectly. And this despite the fact that the proportion of left-handers among people is quite large – about XNUMX%!
And in 1903, Cesare Lombroso summed up these discriminatory ideas on a “scientific” basis by publishing a work in which he argued that left-handed people become criminals 3 times more often than right-handed people and suffer from sleepwalking more often. Over time, left-handers began to attribute a predisposition to various mental illnesses – in particular, schizophrenia.
Surprisingly: a little more than a century has passed, and the situation has changed to a mirror opposite – at the suggestion of popular psychologists, the idea that left-handers are much more talented than drive a car, learn foreign languages more easily…
However, the authors of publications in which these claims are cited rarely provide links to studies in which they would be supported by statistics or experiments.
Does it really matter which hand is the main one for a person? Is it true that nature has linked the number of talents that are given to a person already at birth, with which of the hemispheres of his brain is better developed? We note two reasons why the idea that left-handers are more talented could take hold.
First, in sports, left-handers have the advantage of surprise: in boxing, for example, a right-handed fighter has difficulty adjusting to the fact that his “wrong” opponent prefers a different stance and strikes with great accuracy from the side that is considered relatively safe.
The second reason is due to the fact that left-handers continue to be retrained (not only in some schools, but also in circles and sports sections), they get used to using both hands equally well. Such people – ambidexters – really have advantages: they have better developed abilities for which the large hemispheres of the brain are responsible.
But is this the case with ordinary left-handers, whom no one has retrained? First of all, we note that modern research has shown that left-handers, at least, have no greater predisposition to mental illness than right-handers.
So, one of the myths created by the followers of Lombroso was finally buried by a study conducted in 2010, in which about one and a half thousand people took part. Slightly less than half of them suffered from schizophrenia, the rest of the participants were their brothers and sisters. Part of the participants – both healthy and those who suffered from schizophrenia – belonged to the left-handers. The task of the scientists was to establish whether the asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres predisposes to schizophrenia. The study showed that right-handedness and left-handedness do not have any effect on the onset and development of the disease.
Left-handed people show greater mental flexibility in solving complex problems and generally have stronger short-term memory.
But as for cognitive abilities, the results here are very contradictory. For example, in 2001, neuropsychologists compared the brain structure of 465 volunteers, about half of whom were left-handed, and found that the asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres does not affect either the total volume of gray matter or its distribution in different parts of the brain. In other words, neither left-handed nor right-handed people have significant innate inclinations to be smarter.
But if you look at more subtle cognitive processes, everything turns out to be much more interesting: for example, a study conducted by psychologists at the University of Athens showed that left-handed people demonstrate greater mental flexibility in solving complex problems, better cope with themselves and have generally stronger short-term memory.
For example, in experiments, left-handed people coped much better with the task, according to which it was necessary to combine two objects into a third, new one, for example, to make a birdhouse out of a tin can and a stick. In addition, they were better at grouping a random set of words into a variety of categories, noticing similarities in concepts that seemed to have nothing in common.
And several other studies have shown that the percentage of left-handers among architects, musicians, and representatives of a number of other professions related to art is more significant than the average share of left-handers in society. But among scientists, the proportion of left-handers is not at all higher than the 15% that we spoke about above.
So, the myth about the inferiority of left-handers has long been debunked, but the hypothesis that the brain of left-handers works faster than the brain of right-handers may turn out to be true. However, even in this case, the significance of this fact should not be exaggerated: after all, left-handers are not some special kind of person.