By Alex Berger
Some left-handers are wise and some are otherwise.
Did you know Aug. 13 is National Left-Handers Day and 12 percent of people in the world are left-handers? I did not until I read southpaw-centric science writer David Wolman’s book “A Left-Hand Turn Around the World.” It depicts Wolman’s search for the origins and meaning of left-handedness. He came up empty-handed, at least for definitive discoveries, but found intriguing theories for “laterality,” the scientific word for handedness.
Left-handers are like guns: Both demand respect.
Wolman’s embrace of all things lefty began early in childhood, as the only lefty among four siblings and two righty parents. His mother bought him left-handed mugs and scissors and a bumper sticker — “Lefties never miss at toll booths” — years before he could drive.
A left-hander’s mind is clearer than a right-hander’s. It has to be because they change it more often.
For thousands of years, lefties were considered baddies. The Old Testament makes repeated references to “the right hand of the Lord.” The Latin word for left is “sinister”; in French, it is “gauche,” which means awkward or tactless. For years, children were discouraged from a natural tendency toward left-handedness. In the Middle East, eating with the left hand is considered disgusting. In Islam, using the right hand is a “sunnah,” or recommendation.
There are three kinds of left-handers: those you cannot live without, those you cannot live with and those you must live within — i.e., a group.
Left-handed people were falsely thought to have higher rates of learning disabilities or mental illnesses. On the other hand, the idea that lefties are more gifted in the arts or sports does not hold up statistically. The idea for the book came when Wolman realized he had no clue why one out of 10 people is left-handed.
It is inscribed that left-handers were the last thing that tired God worked on.
“What has motivated me in my quest was to unfold the mystery of what causes left-handedness. What makes us different from the righty majority? And what, if anything, unites us?” he asked. Wolman interviewed researchers who have concluded there is a genetic influence on handedness. Charles Darwin himself ascribed his son’s left-handedness to the fact that the boy’s mother, brother and grandfather were also lefties.
After all this serious science, Wolman traveled to the medieval Ferniehurst Castle in the Scottish lowlands, where the legend of the left-handed Kerr family persists. He did not find any evidence of a long line of lefties stemming from the great swordsman and lefty Andrew Kerr. But he was able to spar with the caretaker on the castle’s unique left-handed staircase to try to learn whether left-handed swordfighters had an advantage.
Wolman could not tell, but did cite studies that have shown there are a higher percentage of lefties in warlike societies because of the advantage they have in crossing swords with their right-handed opponents.
Left-handers became equal when right-handers grew tired of their being left out.
Next, Wolman tackled one of the theories of laterality: that right-handedness evolved in humans because the language centers that control speech are in the left side of the brain. That is the idea behind the “Right Shift Theory,” that since all other animals split 50-50 in which side they use, humans became more right-handed as their ability to speak developed.
That theory took a hit when Wolman visited the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University in Alabama. There, primatologists have found the majority of chimps are right-handed. And when the primates pitch objects at the researchers, almost all of them use their right hands.
This begs the question: Is language exclusively the province of the left side of the brain? To find out, Wolman visited an obscure museum in Paris where two 19th-century brains have been floating in formaldehyde for more than a century. They belonged to two Frenchmen who sustained damage to the left hemispheres of their brains and lost their speech.
That led surgeon Paul Broca to associate different brain hemispheres with different abilities. At the end of his book, Wolman showed that scientific evidence is blurry but developing. “So the next time someone asks how left-handers are different, simply reply by saying they’re special. And that science can prove it.”
Readers, I love left-handers. And to dispel any disbelief, I married one.
Contact Alex Berger at timesledgernews@cnglocal.com.
