Why is the majority of the population right handed?

[flow]

I know we've had threads on which hand do you prefer using before, but I just wanted to ask a different question. Why is it that most people are right handed? Personally, I'm ambidextrous. I use my right hand primarily for throwing and shooting (in basketball), but I write with my left hand. I've actually always had a tough time deciding which hand to use when doing basic tasks. As a child, my parents said it was kind of peculiar to watch me eat, because I would frequently switch hands while using a utensil in the middle of a meal. In all of my classes I like to look around at what hands everyone is using to write with, and it's just so odd to me that in most of my classes at least 90% of the class is right handed. We have two hands, shouldn't there be an equal chance of favoring one over the other? WHY IS IT SO LOPSIDED!? Discuss.

 

[Cogwulf]

When children are given a pen their teacher or parent puts it in to their right hand, so over time the child develops control of that hand better than the other.

The alternative theory is that it's due to the dominance of either the left or right brain hemisphere

 

[Shatokan]

Think about writing, in which direction do most languages orientate. When pens were used , writing with the left hand would end up smearing most languages, causing the right hand to be used. Though this is just my personal theory, a few left handed people i have talked to have trouble smearing their writing when using a pen and thus usually use a pencil.

 

[Darby]

Think about writing, in which direction do most languages orientate. When pens were used , writing with the left hand would end up smearing most languages, causing the right hand to be used. Though this is just my personal theory, a few left handed people i have talked to have trouble smearing their writing when using a pen and thus usually use a pencil.

I had a good friend who was left handed, and he wrote in the most beautiful cursive, and I never once saw him smear anything. EDIT: He did use a mechanical pencil by the way. But I've had a problem with smearing the graphite (I also push rather hard) so I wouldn't think that was it.

I had heard that many left handed people hold the pen differently when they write just so they don't smear it, but I don't remember my friend doing that either.

 

[Shatokan]

I had a good friend who was left handed, and he wrote in the most beautiful cursive, and I never once saw him smear anything. EDIT: He did use a mechanical pencil by the way. But I've had a problem with smearing the graphite (I also push rather hard) so I wouldn't think that was it.

I had heard that many left handed people hold the pen differently when they write just so they don't smear it, but I don't remember my friend doing that either.

How long did he have to perfect the art of writing with his left hand. If you have a problem, your going to work out how to fix it. So in essence, if he is 20, started writing when he is 5, he is going to have 15 years of practice not smearing it. Same as anything else.

If you've ever tried writing left handed and your right handed, e's s's q's and other letters are often accidentally written backwards when you start because with your left hand the process of writing them is totally backwards.

Have him write on a dry erase board. or chalk board and you'll know what i mean. (preferably one in a classroom or mounted on a wall at shoulder height.

 

[Cogwulf]

Think about writing, in which direction do most languages orientate. When pens were used , writing with the left hand would end up smearing most languages, causing the right hand to be used. Though this is just my personal theory, a few left handed people i have talked to have trouble smearing their writing when using a pen and thus usually use a pencil.

The reverse is also true, the first writers found it easier to use their left hand so they went from left to right

 

[Shatokan]

The reverse is also true, the first writers found it easier to use their left hand so they went from left to right

This begs the question, did written language change because dominant hand changed or did dominant hand change because written language changed.

 

[Words]

Think about writing, in which direction do most languages orientate. When pens were used , writing with the left hand would end up smearing most languages, causing the right hand to be used. Though this is just my personal theory, a few left handed people i have talked to have trouble smearing their writing when using a pen and thus usually use a pencil.

I'm a left handed pen user with no problems of smearing. I'm not exactly sure what your saying but Why is it exactly disadvantageous to "have trouble smearing their writing"? or Why does left-handed=smearing?

 

[echoplex]

I'm left-handed and I remember even as a small child it made no sense to me why someone would consciously choose to write with their right hand. It just seems like, with your left hand, you're moving and facing in the direction of the words you're writing. With your right hand, it's as if you're facing the opposite direction, so if feels like you're moving backwards to me.

Of course, I'm biased, being left-handed; but these were my first impressions of writing as far back as age 4 or so. The left hand just seemed like the.... logical choice. Plus, my penmanship was always better than my classmates, so I always considered that evidence of the superiority of left-hand writing. (I'm half-kidding, but there may be a correlation)

I can only assume (well, guess) that us lefties are just wired differently, because I don't think most people really choose their dominant hand, it's as if it's chosen for them by forces they can't control. Both hands have their pros and cons (like how lefties end up with pencil/pen residue on their hand, ugggh)

EDIT: Oh yeah, like flow, I don't use the same hand for everything. I'm lefty for writing, throwing, eating, tooth-brushing, etc., but I'm righty for opening doors, shooting/dribbling basketball, shaking hands, etc.

I have no idea why I'm so weird. I've always just done what feels comfortable/possible.

 

[Darby]

Why does left-handed=smearing?

because often left handed people, when holding the pen the way right handed people do(with the pen facing inside, or "behind" the hand), tend to rub the pinky side of their hand on the paper, rubbing the trail of fresh ink, and thereby smearing the writing(because when writing from left to right, the pen in the left handed persons hand is now in front of the hand when they write).

EDIT: As for what Echoplex said, I also thought of a way to describe my hands motion, I thought of it as some sort of machine, that left a trail of (insert some substance here), somewhat like a slug. I realize this isn't exactly a pretty picture, but that was my explanation.

 

[Shatokan]

I often see left handed people writing like this, holding the pen so as their hand isn't resting where they just wrote.

if you go to this site:
http://www.nibs.com/Left-hand writers.htm

Left-handers must push their fountain pens at least some of the time, while a right-handed person pulls or draws most of their marks. Add to this trouble the problem of slow drying ink, and left-handed people are sometimes faced with ink stained palms as well.

They clearly differentiate between the ways people that use their left hand write, each way is designed to keep their hand off what they just wrote to keep it from smearing. Thus coping with the "problem". Whereas right handed people rest their hand NEXT to where their writing, thus crimping their hand less. If you watch someone right handed, there will sometimes be variations, but for the most part they will rest their hand where they are fixing to write, thus not touching any part of the writing until going to the next line and the ink is dry. This is why i said, try writing on a dry erase board at about shoulder/head hight.
You as a left handed person may not notice you do it, but you have developed some way to keep from running your hand across what you just wrote.

I'm left-handed and I remember even as a small child it made no sense to me why someone would consciously choose to write with their right hand. It just seems like, with your left hand, you're moving and facing in the direction of the words you're writing. With your right hand, it's as if you're facing the opposite direction, so if feels like you're moving backwards to me.

As for a response for this, i've always found right handed people pull the letters out of the page and left handed people push it out. The difference in how it looks depends on the person, that has nothing to do with left or right handedness.

 

[Words]

But then there's the language issue wherein it requires you to write from right to left. and then there's the type of pen.

 

[Reverse Transcriptase]

Who's ready for me to drop the bomb on you guys?

But first, since I'm left handed, I'll make you listen to some anecdotes
I remember coming back from school, in elementary & middle school, with my left hand covered in graphite. On busy days I'd actually have a layer of graphite on the bottom of my left hand, so that my hand would be gray. The same happened with ink, but not as badly. I guess I often felt proud, that the graphite on my hand was proof that I had done a lot of pencil work (usually math).

Also it helps since all my girlfriends have been right-handed. We can both sit next to eachother, and have our dominant hands free. Which means we can eat close & side-by-side, or we can both try to solve Sodoku together. (Using pens with differently colored ink... so we can see who got more numbers.)

So here's a quote from the book "Left Hand Turn Around the World". It talks about Broca's research about lefties.

Broca zoomed in on the relevant area of the left hemisphere associated with speech deficits and made it impossible to ignore that anatomical reality of an uneven brain with localized functions. "This opened the way," writes Oliver Sacks, "to a cerebral neurology, which made it possible, over decades, to 'map' the human brain, ascribing specific powers - linguistic, intellectual, perceptual, etc.-- to equally specific 'centers' of the brain."

...

It didn't take long for Broca's peers to come up with challenges to the infant theory of cerebral localization. Broca embraced such skeptical questioning and was able to show that damage to one area of the left hemisphere would impair patients differently than damage contained specifically within this speech "center." But the more puzzling exceptions were the small number of patients with either left-hemisphere damage and no difficulties with spoken language, or the tell-tale inability to speak, yet only frontal lobe damage in the right hemisphere.

Broca could only surmise that for a minority of people, localization of the speech center must be reversed between the left and right hemispheres. At one point he suggested that these people might also have their handedness reversed, i.e., that such individuals would be left-handed, but later he said these two exceptions to the left-side dominance for speech weren't necessarily united. That is, they didn't have to be one and the same anomaly. Satisfied with the broader theory of hemispheric localization and the explanation it provided for speechless patients like Leborgne and Lelong, Broca was apparently ready to move on to the next scientific inquiry of the day.

A few years after the sonic boom from his findings had subsidied--"How could two seemingly identical masses of grey matter of the brain be so different?"--other thinkers hurried to tie up what they perceived to be the obvious, and as one current scholar put it, "psychologically seductive" theory that Broca's research had inadvertently led them to conclude.

Broca correctly observed that the faculties for speech production reside in a particular area of the left hemisphere, except for the rare instances when they don't. Because some people are an exception to the language-to-the-left rule, and because a similarly small proportion of people are left-handed, everyone and his cousin in the medical establishment figured the two must go hand in hand; lefties should have language lateralized to the right.

What's interesting about this conclusion is that few people in nineteenth-century Europe would have admitted to being left-handed. Detecting someone's left-handedness would have been difficult, with eating, writing, and other major tasks all usually carried out with the right hand. What's also interesting about this conclusion is that it's wrong. Nearly 99 percent of right-handers have language located in the left hemisphere, and about 70 percent of lefties do. A different proportion, yes, but hardly the opposite; most lefty brains are like righty brains, at least as far as speech function is concerned. The rest either have language in the right hemisphere, or have it distributed more evenly between the two sides of the brain.

I think the bolded quote is vastly important, and I'm looking for the study that he cited.

And I totally think that a 30% switch, compared to a 1% one, is VASTLY important.

FOUND IT:
http://www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/NRN2003/NRN2003R.pdf

And I found that the author of the Lefties book is kinda shitty.
From Thompson's paper:

Approximately 97% of right-handers have their
speech and language localized to the left hemisphere, while only 3% demonstrate a right-hemisphere lateralization
or bilateral language representation. These relationships degrade to only 70/30 in left-handed individuals

 

[echoplex]

^That's interesting. I think the 70%-99% difference is more significant than the quote makes it out to be. It may also tell us other things about the brains of those 30% of lefties with language on the right.

And it seems that some lefties ONLY write left, and then do everything else right-handed. Since writing is obviously a language function and most other things aren't, those lefties might, perhaps, be more likely to be included in that 30%? I'm curious which group my brain would fit into.

 

[Reverse Transcriptase]

Haha, shit guys, I think I just rubbed the data the wrong way.

Let's imagine that lefties make up 10% of the population, righties make up 90%, ambidextrous freaks like flow don't exist. (mmmm..... good imagination )
I'm also going to ignore the mention of people who have equal language centers...

We know from the paper that Lefties are 70% left brained for language, 30% right brained for language. Righties are 97% percent left brained for language, 3% right brained for language.

Total amounts of: (These all add up to 1)

• L-hand L-language: 0.07
• L-hand R-language: 0.03
• R-hand L-language: 0.873
• R-hand R-language: 0.027

So we focus on people who are L or R brained.

Ratios of R-hand to L-hand for:

• L-language: 12.47 Righties to 1 Lefty
• R-language: 0.9 Righties to 1 Lefty

If you are Right brained for language, you have a half chance of becoming left or right handed! If you're left brained for language, you are extremely more likely to be right handed!

The really small amount of people with switched language centers (5.7%) was what made this data look like the language-brain-side didn't make a difference, but I think it does.


There was another article that talks about how lefties tend to have higher salaries, and tend to be more creative, because they seem to use bot hemispheres of their brain together better.

How about this: Lefties tend to have certain parts of their brains swapped, so they don't conform to the 'normal' brain set-up. But having swapped brain-functions make them need to do more cross-talk in their brains. *shrug*.

I really want to look at the rates of asymmetry for lots of different regions of the brain.

 

[flow]

Wait, but I do exist! Ummm, interesting research. I'm still not really sure what it all means..

 

[RobertJ]

LOL INTPs...
people are right handed because that's the hand you swing a sword with. the left hand was used to hold a shield, protecting the left side of your chest where ur heart is. Eggheads think it all has to do with writing...

 

[Darby]

LOL INTPs...
people are right handed because that's the hand you swing a sword with. the left hand was used to hold a shield, protecting the left side of your chest where ur heart is. Eggheads think it all has to do with writing...

Or do you swing a sword with your right hand because you have better control? although the shield thing I think beats me anyways FAIL

 

[Van]

It would be weird if some people had their heart on the right. 'I'm right-hearted'.

You know how most people hold their cutlery with the fork on the left and the knife on the right, then if they put the knife down they switch the fork to the right hand? Why do they do that? I hold my fork in my right hand at all times which makes people think I'm left-handed, but I'm right-handed.

 

[Darby]

It would be weird if some people had their heart on the right. 'I'm right-hearted'.

You know how most people hold their cutlery with the fork on the left and the knife on the right, then if they put the knife down they switch the fork to the right hand? Why do they do that? I hold my fork in my right hand at all times which makes people think I'm left-handed, but I'm right-handed.

I fixed this by never putting my knife down, it bugged me too, but it was also too awkward to hold it differently, so I just hold both all the time, and eat with the fork in my left hand

 

[Cavallier]

You know how most people hold their cutlery with the fork on the left and the knife on the right, then if they put the knife down they switch the fork to the right hand? Why do they do that? I hold my fork in my right hand at all times which makes people think I'm left-handed, but I'm right-handed.

The History channel tells me that the early American settlers during the revolutionary war did this intentionally to show their inherent difference from the British.

I think there is some merit to the shield covering the heart theory. Mandy Patinkin often proves me wrong.

I am not left handed.

 

[Jah]

That's like Left side driving.

To better use the favored hand for fighting...
but then again, it's kinda like the chicken and the egg, all over again.
(Though egg was first, considering dinosaurs.)

There's also a little hint about how we organize time.

Most westerners organize time, as we write, from left to right.

Right is future, Left is Past.
This may be because of how we write, or we may write this way because of how we organize time.

In arabic countries, I've read somewhere, but am a little unsure about source, there's more even split.
They also seem to organize time more back to front, making past behind them, and future in front.
Which kinda makes time more relative, and less structured, I guess.

But then again, they write right to left.
So maybe these things are interconnected.


Mayhaps this is pure speculation, but shouldn't people generally be more ambidextrous ? and then depending on society, coerced into favoring a hand and a world model. ?

Maybe we can look for these tendencies in other apes, perhaps they too have favored hands, and eye.

In that case, it may be nature for us, and we may rule out environment, though it clearly coerces and otherwise alters children into this right-hand philosophy. (Left handed are called Sinister, and sinister people are unnerving to religious people, and should be prosecuted.... ;P)

 

[cheese]

Could be related to this?

http://intpforum.com/showthread.php?t=5909

According to this guy, it's because we stopped eating fruit.

Don't know why the left took over though. Haven't read the book yet.

 

[Reverse Transcriptase]

LOL INTPs...
people are right handed because that's the hand you swing a sword with. the left hand was used to hold a shield, protecting the left side of your chest where ur heart is. Eggheads think it all has to do with writing...

Yeah, I second the fail. The book "Left Hand Turn Around the World" mentioned that theory, but disproved it. I mean, how often is it really that a killing blow goes directly to one's heart? It seems more likely that there would be a BENEFIT from being left-handed in the sword fighting context, because most righties are used to fighting over righties. Fighting a lefty makes everything different! Except the lefty has always had practice fighting righties.

Anyway, back to writing...

 

[ckm]

I am left-handed. Perhaps the majority of people are right-handed because of the left-brain's dominance in this civilisation? Undeveloped thought.

I'm curious as to what significance having verbal functions in the right-brain. Does that mean other functions are transferred into the left-brain instead, like spacial stuff? Could they "harmonise" when based in the same hemisphere?

 

[Cavallier]

I mean, how often is it really that a killing blow goes directly to one's heart? It seems more likely that there would be a BENEFIT from being left-handed in the sword fighting context, because most righties are used to fighting over righties. Fighting a lefty makes everything different! Except the lefty has always had practice fighting righties.

Thus the Mandy Patinkin reference...am I the only one with the Princess Bride love?

[/derail]

 

[ckm]

LOL INTPs...
people are right handed because that's the hand you swing a sword with. the left hand was used to hold a shield, protecting the left side of your chest where ur heart is. Eggheads think it all has to do with writing...

Link is left-handed!

 

[Madoness]

I consider myself left-handed as I do write with my left hand. Though my relatives have a history being both handed. I'm able to do some things with my left hand as with writing, but I do a lot that I cannot do with my left hand (as in using a fork while eating).

 

[ijustprotectedmyidentity]

why is the majority of the people left brained?

 

[boradicus]

I know we've had threads on which hand do you prefer using before, but I just wanted to ask a different question. Why is it that most people are right handed? Personally, I'm ambidextrous. I use my right hand primarily for throwing and shooting (in basketball), but I write with my left hand. I've actually always had a tough time deciding which hand to use when doing basic tasks. As a child, my parents said it was kind of peculiar to watch me eat, because I would frequently switch hands while using a utensil in the middle of a meal. In all of my classes I like to look around at what hands everyone is using to write with, and it's just so odd to me that in most of my classes at least 90% of the class is right handed. We have two hands, shouldn't there be an equal chance of favoring one over the other? WHY IS IT SO LOPSIDED!? Discuss.

My mother, most probably an INTP such as myself, was harshly scolded and reprimanded if not physically punished for her dominant inclination to use her left hand. As a result she learned instead to use her right hand; however, this did not prevent my mother from her artistic talent (she had drawn many a wonderful sketch of her favorite animals), nor did it limit her capacity for understanding and contribution to the world. She became at teacher for gifted middle school children and went on to be listed in the Who's Who book due to recommendations by student's parents. My mother is one of the most intelligent people I have ever known - and I can assure you she did not approve nor enjoy the punishment that she endured as a result of being a natural 'southpaw.' I think, in fact, that she often wondered at what sort of artist she could have become if only she had not had the use of her right hand beaten into her...

Barbarians.

 

[Vrecknidj]

Babies in the womb are soothed by their mother's heartbeat. When nursing, they prefer to lie on their mother in a way that the pounding heart can continue to serve as a soothing sound. Because of where the heart is, the baby prefers to rest on the mother in a certain way. This causes most people to hear better on one side than the other. This also causes brain development on the left side that probably is affiliated withe a developed right-handedness.

That's my guess.

Dave

 

[pjoa09]

maybe everything is constructed easier for the right hand? genetically the right hand has more nerves connecting to the brain? muscles grow easier with the right hand through evolution of some sort?

maybe, left hand is a relatively common harmless mutation?