I’ve never thought of myself as part of a minority, but flicking through a scientific journal this week it dawned on me that I am. I’m talking about my place among the vilified 10 per cent of people who favour the use of their left hands and feet, rather than their right. Reading an article on the multitudinous theories about why people develop such preferences, I was reminded of some of the routine humiliations a southpaw must suffer.
At primary school, for example, my left-handedness singled me out for unwanted attention from authorities. When I was six or seven, I distinctly remember a teacher encouraging me (forcing, that is) to write with my right hand, like all the other kids. I tried for a while, but clearly failed, and my handwriting never recovered.
Another blow came in high school when I started to learn Italian. “Shocked” hardly does justice to my feelings when the teacher, a man whose protuberant moustache was bettered only by his belly, explained that the Italian word for left is sinistra, as in sinister. If I’d learned French, gauche would have been an equally unpleasant alternative.
Given these everyday humiliations and the countless other obstacles a left-hander must overcome - scissors, golf clubs, cutlery - it is no surprise to find that we suffer emotionally and physically as a result.
Studies show that left-handers are more prone to a host of different injuries, such as joint pain or finger damage, for example. A Canadian study also found that left-handed college students were significantly more likely than right-handers to have had a motor vehicle accident in the preceding two years.
Back in 1991, researchers Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published a paper that appeared to seal the fate of left-handers. In the Psychological Bulletin, they reported that “sinistrals” had a 1 to 2 per cent higher risk of dying in any given year, beyond the age of 33. Overall, according to their studies, left-handers die an average of eight years earlier than right-handers.
Those results offered a possible explanation for the well-recorded fact that the proportion of the population who are left-handed decreases with age. But, thankfully for us lefties, more recent studies have proffered an alternative reason.
For example, in 2000, Olga Basso and other researchers studied more than 100 Danish twins born between 1900 and 1910, and found that left-handers died no earlier than right-handers. The reason fewer old people were left-handed, they suggested, was because more of them had been badgered into switching to right-handedness in their youth.
Still, we’re left with the question of why it is that something like one in 10 people favours their left hand, while the rest use their right more often. There seems to be no short answer to that.
One element is genetic. An article in Scientific American Mind this month points out that two right-handed people have only a 9.5 per cent chance of having a left-handed child, while the chance is 19.5 per cent for a mixed-handed couple and 26 per cent for a pair of left-handers. Then again, one in five sets of genetically identical twins favour different hands, suggesting other factors are at play.
Another possibility is that being left-handed is somehow a result of brain damage. Some studies have found a link between trauma at birth, or lack of oxygen at birth, and being left-handed. Others have pointed out that left-handers are more likely to suffer learning disorders and epilepsy. But researchers have also shown that handedness is apparent before birth: some fetuses prefer to suck on their left thumb, rather than their right.
One thing that is pretty clear is that handedness is associated with the differing functions of the brain’s two hemispheres, and more specifically language. Among most people, language is processed more intensely in the left hemisphere of the brain - the side that operates the right side of the body. This fact suggests to some scientists that language might have played a strong part in driving the dominance of right-handedness.
Interestingly, among a few left-handers, the language processing is more dominant on the right side of the brain, or is handled by both sides equally. I’ve seen it suggested that this might play a part in the much-vaunted creativity of lefties, and could even be an explanation for why left-handedness has survived throughout human evolution.
Whether that’s the case, there do seem to be a lot of creative left-handers. The standard list includes Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Lewis Carroll, Jean Genet and C.P.E. Bach, for example.
Maybe their creativity is a result of the way their brains were organised in the first place, or perhaps it is an effect of their having to get by in a right-handed world. Regardless, it’s a sad fact that for most of us southpaws, the great-artist club is one minority to which we definitely do not belong.
