While there are pieces of equipment designed to aid left handed users, these aren't hugely common so many people still find things difficult. As it stands, and how it looks to remain is that being left handed does not qualify a person to claim disability benefit in the UK, USA or anywhere else in the world.
Left-handed people are said to be good at complex reasoning, resulting in a high number of lefty Noble Prize winners, writers, artists, musicians, architects and mathematicians. According to research published in the American Journal of Psychology, lefties appear to be better at divergent thinking.
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.
In a study published in Laterality, it was found that left-handed people have a lower prevalence of arthritis and ulcers. It probably doesn't have to do with your handedness, though. Researchers believe it's related to the underlying DNA that creates left-handedness––the genes that are associated with lefties.
In their analysis of 144 handedness and brain laterality studies—accounting for a total of nearly 1.8 million individuals—University of Oxford psychologists Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, PhD, and Maryanne Martin, PhD, found that males are about 2 percent more likely to be left-handed than females.
Although hand preference can be learnt, the genetic influence is surprisingly consistent. If two parents are right-handed, their offspring has a 10% chance of being left-handed.
Wright and Hardie (2012) found that left-handers reported higher levels of state anxiety but there was no difference in trait anxiety. They also demonstrated that when Trait Anxiety was controlled for, left-handers still showed a higher level of state anxiety compared to right-handers.
The same brain differences that contribute to left-handedness also contribute to psychotic disorders. But there's a bright side. Only about 10% of the population is left-handed, yet lefties make up as much as 40% of cases of psychotic disorders.
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.
Left-handers – we know from our own surveys that 74% of left-handers eat with a knife and fork in the “right-handed” way – with the fork in their left hand and feeding themselves with the left hand.
Various surveys have found that the highest incidence of left-handedness is in Western countries. The Netherlands, the USA and Canada lead with around 13 per cent of the population being left-handed and the UK is only just behind.
Sometimes people who are left-handed are called many different things, “Southpaws”, "Lefties", and other simply mean names, like "Weird" or "Strange".
Left-handed and ambidextrous people are more susceptible to negative emotions, including anger. A small study published last year in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease found that the brains of lefties process emotions differently than those of righties, with more communication between the brain's two halves.
In a Turkish study, 33% of blue-eyed participants were left-handed, compared to 19% of brown-eyed. This statistic is significant in the context of a blog post about Blue Eyes Statistics because it suggests that there may be a correlation between eye color and handedness.
Research suggests that between ten and twelve percent of the world's population is left-handed. Even though being left-handed might mean struggling with right-handed scissors from time-to-time, there are plenty of reasons being a lefty is pretty cool!
THIS STUDY TESTED WHETHER LEFT-HANDED JUVENILES ARE OVERREPRESENTED AMONG VIOLENT JUVENILE OFFENDERS AND FOUND THAT LEFT-HANDED OFFENDERS SCORED LOWER THAN RIGHT-HANDERS ON THE VIOLENCE SCALE.
Brain scans indicate that left-handed people think differently from right-handed people. They tend to activate the right half of their brain more for certain tasks and functions. Experts suggest that this difference in brain function could make creativity come more easily.
In addition to increased alcohol consumption, left-handers report significantly more lifetime experience with illicit drugs, including heroin, ecstasy and hallucinogens, than right-handers (Preti et al., 2012). Such findings suggest that left-handedness is associated with increased risk for harms from substance use.
This indicates that if females had a chance of being left-handed of exactly 10 percent, males would have a 12 percent chance (the exact percentages vary a bit depending on geographical region). Given the low incidence of left-handedness in general, this 2 percent increase is quite a substantial difference.
Approximately 10% of all children are left-handed: about 11% of boys and 9% of girls. These statistics are consistent with findings in the literature on handedness.
Some children experience them from early stages of literacy education, while others occur at a later stage while reading texts. In comparison to right-handed people, left-handed people are 2.5-3 times more likely to have difficulty in mastering written speech -- in both writing and reading.
The genes linked with left-handedness result in differences in brain structure, the scientists found. For the first time, scientists have identified the genetic differences associated with left-handedness, a trait found in 10% of the human population.
Left-handedness — sometimes called "sinistrality" — means you prefer to use your left hand rather than your right hand for routine activities, such as writing. Most people who have studied left-handedness believe that approximately 10 percent of the people in the world are left-handed.