Heres a few statistics to ponder on. Only 7 % of the population on average is left handed but in some sports, especialy those that need hand eye coordination or a good judgment of distance, there tends to be a far higher percentage of left hand practitioners. So with profesional tennis players 14% are left handed and with professional boxers its a staggering 40% left handed.
Also something else to ponder for those who were talking about the bible. The path of individualism, sometimes called satanism, is also refered to as the left hand path and we also get the word sinister from a latin catholic reference to left handedness.
In some catholic schools pupils were forced to write with their right hands, my girlfriends older brother being one, and another friend I used to work with told me;

" the Nuns used to wrap my knuckles with a wooden ruler whenever they saw me pick up a pen with my left hand and then tell me I was an evil little boy"

His parents eventualy saw the bruising and moved him to another school.

Left handed people are also allegidly better on average in IQ tests although many people do not think they are a good indicator of intelligent ability and also they tend to have more violent tendencies than right handers. This could possibly explain the high percentage of boxers and also the sinister connotations of the church.

BTW I'm a natural left hander too


regards,

Neal

The Latin word "sinister" just means "left", and "dexter" just means "right".

How did all the emotional baggage get attached to those words ??

I also heard that lefties have a shorter average life span.

I think that it is time to post a link to my favourite leftys story again. So

here

it is.

But I think that people who can use both hands well are getting the best results. (Ambidextrous is the name, I think.)

Willeke

Quote:


LOL

i'm left handed, but i've ended up being one of those mixed up left and right handed people, too many tools made for right hands...
actually i'm fairly ambidexterous, the list of things i can do with only one hand or the other is shorter than what i can do with either.
actually it's great for reducing repetitive motion injuries, i can switch off hands with most jobs at work when one side starts to wear out.

here is what i've heard about all those leftie statistics:
there is a theory out there that there are two different kinds of lefties, natural lefties and lefties that are really righties who suffered mild brain damage in the womb.
the brain compensates and shifts developement to the other side of the brain, strange theory but it makes as much sense as not when trying to make sense of the supposed benefits and supposed liabilities of being left handed.
i naturally think that being ambidexterous is the natural and best way to be, it's a lifelong pursuit for me but i've developed a couple of tricks for assisting it.
first off, whenever you learn a new skill, transfer it to your nondominant side before you get too good at it, otherwise it can be too annoying to go back to being incompetent once your dominant side has got it down pat.
do symmetrical exercises, i happen to think that juggling is the best.
try to get used to thinking of mirror images,
{how many lefties have a touch of dislexia? and what benefits might be hiding behind that disorder?}
it seems a lot easier to me to transfer a mirror image skill to my other side than one which won't translate through the mirror (writing is an example of nonmirroring while throwing, brushing teeth, etc, are mirrorable tasks)

with all of that said, i do suffer sometimes from not being able to figure out which side to do a task with, and sometimes i will find that i'm a bit slower of a learner from stopping to transfer the new skill, but it seems to be less of a problem over time, and with practice i tend to unconciously pick a favored side for various tasks and then not have to think of it.
i do believe that working with both sides makes me more mentally flexible if not actually smarter, i'm certainly a lot less inconvenienced when it's necessary to do awkward tasks on the fly, nuts and bolts around corners, off handed hammering, weird sawzall angles and the like.
as for the shorter lifespan of lefties, the accidental/prenatal damage leftie aside i can testify that the righthanded world is occasionally more dangerous to lefties by design, i'll bet that most successful lefties are more than a little bit ambidexterous as a result.