Parlor Spider...Step In, Little Fly

Insightful thoughts and/or rants from atop the soapbox from one who wishes to share the "right" opinion with everyone.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Handing It To Lefties




ONE AND A HALF LEFT-HANDERS

Our family of six has four and a half right-handed people, and one and a half left-handers. That means we're just above the norm in a world where one in ten people are left-handed. The "half" comes as a result of one of our children who does most everything but bat and hit a golf ball right-handed. It seems that the most successful major league hitters are left-handed so the kid was taught to hit lefty when he first began to bat, thus...the "half."
Our new president (well, not so new anymore) is a left-handed person, but so are four of the last six presidents! Ford, Reagan, the elder Bush and Clinton were all of that persuasion while Carter and George W. Bush are righties. Now, that degree of lateralization seems odd to me, and it has caught the imagination of scientists as well...though they have no idea what to make of it. In fact, they don't know for sure where a person's "handedness" originates. Best guess? Culture, environment and/or genes--well, THAT certainly narrows it down! High fives all around!
What they DO know, however, is that almost anything with a brain is subject to this lateralization: meaning all the animals one could think of with extended extremities as well as animals with NO hands or feet like fish, and even animals with no backbone, hands or feet like honeybees (with the exception of the bee on the ceral box...he has hands) display a tendency to create movement more from one side of the body than the other.
So why do we have this capacity at all? Scientists seem to think that by dividing the brain into hemispheres, we can multi-task, doing more than one thing at a time, NOT including texting and driving a car. Dividing tasks by brain hemispheres saves space and working capacity which can make us more efficient (by "us" I mean any species in which action is dominant from one side). In addition, you may or may not know that the left side of our brains controls the right side of our bodies and vice versa. Ergo, left-handed people should be right-brained, and right-handed people should be left-brained. Scientists don't claim that this is a hard fact, though.
However, there seems to be some evidence that lefties are statistically more likely to die from accidents and suffer from immune disorder diseases. One the other hand (so to speak), they seem to do better in fights as evidenced by societies which are dominated by lefties.
Well, now! Be sure to keep that left guard up!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home