- Left-handed people face everyday challenges that right-handed people never have to worry about, such as smudges on their hands while writing or using scissors made for right-handed people.
- Although only 10% of the entire population is left-handed, many influential people throughout history are, such as Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Babe Ruth.
- Although left-handed people may seem at a disadvantage, their manual dexterity can lead them to be more creative, better athletes, and may have better health.
Being left-handed comes with a handful of drawbacks that I am all too familiar with being left-handed myself. Right-handers never have to worry about smudges on their hands while writing or the struggle of using proper scissors.
Many things, like the numeric keypad on the side of a keyboard or the pedals in a car, are not made with left-handed people in mind, most likely because only 10% of the human population is left-handed, as you’ve already told me. Business Insider.
However, that 10% includes some of the most influential people in history, from presidents like Barack Obama, entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, and media moguls like Oprah Winfrey. It’s easy to wonder if the less popular manual skill is associated with some advantages.
As a result, Some scientific studies suggest that sinistrality (the medical term for when body parts on the left side function better than those on the right side) could have a positive impact on your life.
1. Left-handed people are more creative
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Left-handedness is associated with “higher divergent thinking,” a thought process that explores possible solutions and generates creative ideas based on existing information.as previously mentioned Business InsiderHowever, the aforementioned study only supports this conclusion for men.
In addition, University of Liverpool researchers Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet stated in The Conversationin 2017 that left-handed people are more likely to have a more developed right hemisphere of the brain, the part that performs tasks related to creativity.
The right brain hemisphere is associated with creativity because it controls non-verbal, conceptual, holistic, intuitive and imaginative processes, according to Scientific American.
2. Left-handed people may be better athletes
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Babe Ruth’s sporting success may have been related to his left-handedness.
In 2017, Biology Letters published a study showing that Left-handed men and women are overrepresented in elite sports, such as baseball, table tennis, cricket and other interactive games where players have to react quickly.
Read more: Do left-handers have an advantage in some sports?
3. Left-handed people face challenges better
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A small study published in 2013 in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology tested the performance of 47 right-handed and 50 left-handed subjects on a series of tasks involving task execution.
The results suggest that left-handed people have greater mental flexibility, as reported The New Yorkerwhich can help them adapt to new situations.
4. Left-handed people think differently
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According to the American Psychological Association (APA), Left-handed people are less likely to have highly lateralized brains, or brains where certain cognitive functions are specialized on each side of the brain.
In left-handed people, information can pass more frequently between the brain hemispheres, leading to unique ideas and solutions to problems.
“Right-handers might dismiss an idea as too radical, but left-handers might be willing to follow the thought and develop a solution that a right-handed brain would skip over,” Michael Corballis, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, tells the APA.
5. Left-handed people may have better health
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Another study in Laterality published in 2005 has discovered with a sample of more than a million people know that left-handed people have a lower rate of arthritis and ulcers.
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