While it might seem like a trivial pursuit, writing with your left hand as a right-hander offers numerous benefits. From improved brain function to better coordination, and even resilience in case of injury, taking the time to develop this skill can have lasting positive effects on your overall well-being.
Although teaching people to become ambidextrous has been popular for centuries, this practice does not appear to improve brain function, and it may even harm our neural development. Calls for ambidexterity were especially prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
If you are ambidextrous, you're in good company too. Or at least, interesting company. Many people believe training oneself to use both your hands equally unleashes hidden creativity and even improves memory. The idea that becoming ambidextrous boosts brain function has existed for over a century.
Although the percentage varies worldwide, in Western countries, 85 to 90 percent of people are right-handed and 10 to 15 percent of people are left-handed. Mixed-handedness (preferring different hands for different tasks) and ambidextrousness (the ability to perform tasks equally well with either hand) are uncommon.
In fact, one of the more unusual hypotheses to explain the rarity of left-handedness is that a genetic mutation in our distant past caused the language centres of the human brain to shift to the left hemisphere, effectively causing right-handedness to dominate, Alasdair Wilkins explains for io9 back in 2011.
Babe Ruth. The Babe is probably the most famous left-handed slugger of all-time.
The other hand, comparatively often the weaker, less dextrous or simply less subjectively preferred, is called the non-dominant hand. In a study from 1975 on 7,688 children in US grades 1-6, left handers comprised 9.6% of the sample, with 10.5% of male children and 8.7% of female children being left-handed.
They are usually good at sports when in a one-on-one face-off. In games like baseball, boxing, fencing and tennis, left-handers often have an edge over their right-handed opponents who are used to playing with right-handed players mostly. Left-handers have typing advantages.
Because we write from left to right, right handers pull the pencil, writing away from their body while left handers have to push the pencil, writing towards their body. Teaching left handed people to write the same way as right handed people can make handwriting slow, uncomfortable and messy.
The study found that left-handers and right-handers had similar IQ scores, but people who identify as ambidextrous had slightly lower scores, especially in arithmetic, memory and reasoning.
Researchers found that those who are ambidextrous exhibit a lower average I.Q., which pertains to lower mental intelligence, but also found them to have a higher level of creativity.
Some people can write with both hands. Famous examples include Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, James A. Garfield, and Leonardo da Vinci.
A study found that ambidextrous children (those that are both left- and right-handed) are more likely to develop ADHD symptoms later in life, compared to their left-handed and right-handed peers.
These studies show that ambidextrous people perform more poorly than both left- and right-handers on various cognitive tasks, particularly those that involve arithmetic, memory retrieval, and logical reasoning, and that being ambidextrous is also associated with language difficulties and ADHD-like symptoms.
Blogs advise training your non-dominant hand, “stimulating the brain's cognitive and creative functions,” and Alzheimer's websites advocate brushing with the other hand to improve “brain fitness.”
Wright and Hardie (2012) found that left-handers reported higher levels of state anxiety but there was no difference in trait anxiety. They also demonstrated that when Trait Anxiety was controlled for, left-handers still showed a higher level of state anxiety compared to right-handers.
If two parents are right-handed, their offspring has a 10% chance of being left-handed. However, if one or both parents are left-handed, the chance of their child being left-handed becomes higher at 18 to 22% and 27%, respectively.
Sometimes people who are left-handed are called many different things, “Southpaws”, "Lefties", and other simply mean names, like "Weird" or "Strange".
Lefties--or at least relatives of lefties--may be better than right-handed people at remembering events, according to a new study. Since the mid-1980s, scientists have known that the two brain hemispheres of left-handers are more strongly connected than those of right-handers.
Approximately 85 percent of people are right-handed. These theories also try to explain the persistent and continuing presence of a left-handed minority (about 15 percent of humans).
Left-handedness is now accepted as a completely normal aspect of a child's development. A child's handedness will be fixed before they're born and won't be immediately apparent when they are an infant. Experts believe that if both parents are left-handed there is a 50-50 chance that a child will be left-handed too.
McManus which found that the Netherlands has one of the world's highest prevalences of left-handedness at 13.23 percent. The United States isn't far behind with a rate of 13.1 percent while neighboring Canada has 12.8 percent. Elsewhere, rates of left-handedness are far lower and China is a good example.
Special or not, lefties are born, not made: Genetics are at least partially responsible for handedness. Up until last year, it was assumed that hand preference comes from asymmetrical genes in the brain—two hands, two brain hemispheres, one is dominant.