Roughly 90% of humans are right-handed and this is one of the traits that separates us from most other primates who don't really show any overall preference for left or right handedness.
Abrams, which adeptly breaks down a mathematical explanation for why the rate of left-handed people has remained steady—about 10% of the population—for the last 500,000 years. The reason boils down to two words, “competition” and “cooperation,” and how the balance between those forces plays out in human societies.
Although the percentage varies worldwide, in Western countries, 85 to 90 percent of people are right-handed and 10 to 15 percent of people are left-handed. Mixed-handedness (preferring different hands for different tasks) and ambidextrousness (the ability to perform tasks equally well with either hand) are uncommon.
Right-handed people are more skillful with their right hands. Studies suggest that approximately 90% of people are right-handed. Left-handedness is less common. Studies suggest that approximately 10% of people are left-handed.
But handedness has its roots in the brain—right-handed people have left-hemisphere-dominant brains and vice versa—and the lefties who claim Einstein weren't all that far off. While he was certainly right-handed, autopsies suggest his brain didn't reflect the typical left-side dominance in language and speech areas.
While this is still contested, studies have found that artists like painters, musicians and even architects are mostly left-handers. Right and left-handed people deal with tasks and memory in different ways. Left-handers are known to efficiently multitask as they look at the tasks as a whole.
Albert Einstein
Lefties are often considered creative, so it's no surprise that many famous inventors and great minds were left-handed, including Einstein, Marie Curie, Ben Franklin, and Henry Ford. Bill Gates is also a southpaw.
Special or not, lefties are born, not made: Genetics are at least partially responsible for handedness. Up until last year, it was assumed that hand preference comes from asymmetrical genes in the brain—two hands, two brain hemispheres, one is dominant.
And it's also possible for two left-handed parents to have right-handed children. We don't fully understand what causes someone to be left or right handed. But we do know a wide variety of factors are involved, only some of which are genetic.
Lefties Hear Speeches Differently
The left hemisphere, which controls the right hand, likes rapidly-changing sounds like consonants, while the right hemisphere, which controls the left hand, likes slowly-changing sounds like syllables or intonation.
'If a lefty writes with his right hand it's bad, because we're changing the hand but not the leading eye or the leading foot. ' So a child who has had his hand changed is more prone to distraction; he absorbs information more poorly. As a result, he can become more irritable.
Several ideas have been proposed, including both environmental and genetics factors. For example, women might face stronger societal pressure to write with the right hand, but it could also be due to influences of hormones on brain development, or direct effects of specific genes on the X chromosome.
Both left-handed pitchers and batters do better in baseball. Since the majority of hitters are right-handed, lefty pitchers are considered valuable. A curveball from a left-hander breaks inside on a righty – a harder pitch to hit.
Overall, individuals with ADHD had a 27.3 percent chance of being either left-handed or mixed-handed compared to 18.1 percent in the general population. So the results suggest that the effects are smaller than for the autism spectrum, but generally go in the same direction.
Billionaire Bill Gates and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg are left-handers.
Leonardo's left-handedness has come to be regarded as something of a signature, but he was not, of course, the only left-handed artist in the Renaissance.
In a 1996 study, Harvard Medical School researchers found that orthopedic surgeons, librarians and mathematicians were mostly right-handed while attorneys and architects were, as a group, “either the least right-handed or the most left-handed.” Other studies have shown that there are more left-handed people working as ...
Abstract. Left-handedness occurs in about 8% of the human population. It runs in families and an adoption study suggests a genetic rather than an environmental origin; however, monozygotic twins show substantial discordance.
Lefties--or at least relatives of lefties--may be better than right-handed people at remembering events, according to a new study. Since the mid-1980s, scientists have known that the two brain hemispheres of left-handers are more strongly connected than those of right-handers.
First Chronicles 12:2 seems to reference bowmen who were ambidextrous. When the Bible refers to left-handed people, it speaks of left-handedness as an advantage, not a weakness. While it is not as honorable as sitting at someone's right hand, sitting at the left hand is still a position of honor.