Any Lefties?

by Why Georgia 58 Replies latest jw friends

  • Mulan
    Mulan

    I read a theory a couple of years ago that left handed people started as mirror-image twins and their twin died in utero. Fascinating possibility.

  • diamondblue1974
    diamondblue1974

    I am right handed for writing and it is my dominant hand...but I play pool lefthanded??!! and always thought I was weird for that...

  • patio34
    patio34

    This is so interesting!! Thanks for starting the thread Why Georgia!

    This is some stuff from the website mentioned by Jgnat (THANKS!) and it seems to verify what MOST are saying here, that they have a mixed degree of handedness. Myself too: I do most stuff right-handed, but not write and eat. I don't write with the hooked arm and my writing looks pretty much like anyone's, only prettier (not bragging, it just is) and I'm pretty artistic too. Well, here's some stuff from the site:

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    The Left Handed Universe

    http://www.xs4all.nl/~riksmits/lhu/lhu.html

    Contrary to popular wisdom, one cannot simply divide the world into two homogeneous groups: righthanders and lefthanders. Rather, there is a continuum, at whose extremes we find relatively small groups of very strongly left- and righthanded people, respectively. Most of us are somewhere in between, the great majority having a weaker or stronger predilection for the right hand. In broad strokes, the distribution is shown on the right.

    For this reason, classifying people as left- or righthanders is not all that simple. There are many who will perform some tasks with their right, and others with their left hand. Moreover, certain activities, such as writing or eating, are unreliable indices, due to the social pressure that is usually exerted during the learning process. For example, even in left-tolerant societies like the

  • patio34
    patio34

    (I don't know why it didn't take the rest of the post---too long, lol? Here goes:

    the

  • patio34
    patio34

    I give up--having a bit of trouble with it.

    Anyway there's an interesting section on the site about the myth of dying left-handers! Please read it on the site (if it doesn't show up here).

    +++++++++++++++++++++

    The myth of the dying lefthanders

  • Crumpet
    Crumpet
    I've heard left-handed people are very smart, math oriented.

    My stepdaughter is left handed and excels at maths. She eats right haned though!

    I am semi-ambidextrous. I eat left handed and do "certain other things" left handed, but I write right handed.

  • patio34
    patio34

    The myth of the dying lefthanders

    In 1991, psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern claimed they had found the average life expectancy of lefthanders to be no less than nine years shorter than that of righthanders. This dismal state of affairs was due to the clumsiness of lefthanders, combined with the fact that most machines and appliances are designed for righthanded use. As a consequence, lefthanders were simply accident-prone, resulting in an early death.

    Fortunately, their claim is groundless. It is based upon a survey of almost 1.000 deaths in a county somewhere in Southern-California. At least nine months after a person had died, Coren and Halpern asked surviving relatives what hand the deceased used when writing, drawing and throwing a ball. People are notoriously unreliable in their answers to such questions even about themselves, let alone about their parent, uncle or niece, especially if the person in question has been dead for at least almost a year. Ask yourself about how many of your relatives you could confidently and correctly answer these three questions, and you begin to see how rickety Coren and Halpern's method for collecting data was.

    But not only was their database unreliable, their analysis of the data is wrong as well. For one thing, they claim that lefthanders cause more lethal car-crashes, on account of an ill-conceived theory about 'reversed' reflexes: in a fix, a righthander would jerk the wheel to the right, out of the way of oncoming traffic, whereas a lefthander would do the reverse, going straight for the jackpot on the wrong side of the road. At first glance, this seems to tally with the fact that they did find a relatively high proportion of lefthanders dying in cars among their 1.000 deaths. Only, in view of the total size of their sample, the actual number of lefthanded car crash victims was certainly no more than three. Far too low a number to warrant any general conclusion. Also, it seems that they just counted deaths in cars, disregarding the questions whether the car with the lefthander in it was to blame for the accident, whether the accident was a head-on collision with another car (the only type of accident that would be relevant in the light of their 'reverse reflex' theory) or whether the lefthander involved was even driving the car at the relevant time.

    Also, Coren and Halpers claim that the proportion of lefthanders among the population at large decreases from 20% at the age of 20 to a mere 5% among fifty-year-olds. That means that, even if all deaths between those ages should be lefthanders, the death-rate in this age-range should be around 15%, whereas in reality it hovers around 5%. Coren and Halpern have large numbers of people die who never existed.

  • Farkel
    Farkel

    I'm left handed. Sort of. I write left handed and throw a baseball left handed. I bat balls right handed, and kick balls with my right foot. If I were to punch someone, I would use my right hand, because my right arm is strongest. I can eat with either hand.

    I guess that means I'm bisexual.

    Farkel

  • gumby
    gumby
    I'm left handed. Sort of. I write left handed and throw a baseball left handed. I bat balls right handed, and kick balls with my right foot. If I were to punch someone, I would use my right hand, because my right arm is strongest. I can eat with either hand.

    I guess that means I'm bisexual.

    Farkel

    I'm like Farkel cept I'd punch with my left. No....I'd kick em in the nutsack then run! I also hammer right handed, eat left handed, comb my hair left handed, use scissors with my right ( they won't cut left for me) play with myself with my right, point with my left, pick my nose with my left, wipe with my left, get something out of my eye with my left......and that's all I can think of for now. Gumby

Share this

Google+
Pinterest
Reddit