I'm not trying to be cute but I do think that we lefties are a bit smarter on average than righties. Something to do with the way our brains process language.

Oh yeah? And whts rong with the waye we rightyies process langwij?

The presidents of the last two companies I've worked for are both left-handed and they don't use Macs!

Every time I've been in love, it's been with a left-handed man. Except once. Does that make me a gold-digger?

Very sinister....

Very sinister.... Posted by: Stefan

Tres gauche!

Does this include left handed MLB pitchers?

As a young child I was very distraught at not being able to find a left handed baseball glove. Now I find out I have missed out on all of that higher wage stuff, too. Perhaps Major League Baseball's left handed pitchers are skewing the results of all lefty income upward.

My youngest is a leftie (I think - he's pretty ambidextrous), so I sometimes hear how terrible this is from my mother-in-law, who says left-handed people have shorter life expectancy.

This post motivated me to finally look it up, and it turns out the original studies have largely been debunked.

We're better looking, too.

Unconventional, tongue in cheek theory: boy left-handers develop more confidence on average because of superior performance in Little League owed to their left-handedness. The extra pay that college educated left-handers receive is a confidence premium earned as managerial go-getters.

Perhaps southpaws, who reach adulthood without having died in horrible accidents in a right-hand world, are more intelligent than average.:~)

Here's some anecdotal evidence: the fraction of physicists that are lefties sure seems a lot higher than the fraction of the population as a whole. When our department had a softball team, the opponents would yell "Lefty" for the first 3 or 4 batters, and then finally someone would comment "Hell, they're all lefties".

So, it could be that being left handed is correlated with some technical capabilities that are helpful in today's market.

Overcompensation for feeling "different" in childhood?

Or, maybe lefties are forced by right-handed scissoring and other pro-righty setups to become more ambidextrous, and that does something to their brains?

I work in a creative field where us lefties practically outnumber righties. In a company of 45 people, we have just over 20 lefties.

I would give my right arm to be ambidextrous.

I also have a photogenic memory.

I work in a creative field where us lefties practically outnumber righties. In a company of 45 people, we have just over 20 lefties.

Not surprising at all.

The Left Behind series gets it wrong again.

Betty Black,
I don't think you are so far from the truth. Studies have been done that show that men who participated in sports as boys had higher salaries. Being left-handed isn't just an advantage in baseball.

In fact, that is supposedly the reason that tall people make more than short people.

KEVIN DRUM: So does that mean that if I were left-handed I could ask for a 21% raise and get it?

What's more, my sister, who is left handed, gets no benefit from this either. My whole family is on the short end of the stick on this one.

Say, why not let your sister guest-post here sometime? It would be kind of you and increase the blog's quality by 21% all at the same time. (That was a left-handed compliment.)

Old Hat,
Well, I see from searching the web that you lefties are certainly creative. I keep finding references to Einstein being one of you lefties when in fact he was a right-handed.

I wonder if the tools for many jobs that require manual manipulation of materials (e.g., many blue collar jobs) are essentially designed for righties. If I were looking at having to stand facing the "wrong" way on an assembly line for the rest of my working life, I might see about an office job.

But then I'm a righty, so who knows?

maybe lefties are forced by right-handed scissoring and other pro-righty setups to become more ambidextrous

The two worst inventions in the world are left-handed scissors (what was with the "I'm a spaz" plastic grip?) and butter knives in fancy restaurants.

Here's a link to a cool article on "non-right handedness".

http://www.dana.org/pdf/cerebrum/art_v7n4asbury.pdf

I got it from an Andrew Sullivan post a while back.

Of course, lefties are also more prevalent in psych wards and drug treatment programs. I'm not putting down lefties (I'm one).

There also is the notion that lefties have to figure out how to do a great many things on their own, and thus develop improvisational engineering skills, which can aid them in just about any field.

I think it all comes from southpaws being one step closer to first base. Why don't we try running the bases clockwise and check back in a hundred years to see if that reverses the trend.

I doubt that the lefty advantage in team sports can make that much of a difference in confidence across the lefty male population as a whole.

First of all, outside of baseball, is there that much of a lefty advantage anywhere? In football, the 'skill' positions - QB, WR, RB, TE, CB, S - are in the minority, and for most of those, it's hard to see much advantage coming of handedness. And I couldn't honestly tell you about basketball, but it sure appears that you'd need a high level of skill with both hands to prosper in that sport. And then there's sports like track and field, where handedness doesn't matter at all.

Finally, there's the reality that most of us have only incidental participation in those sports; they're a minor part of our lives, even during that handful of years in junior high and high school where we might be involved in them at all. If there's a 'lefty advantage', I think it's somewhere else.

Maybe it's in an early push towards some level of ambidextrousness, causing one's brain as a whole to be more thoroughly developed: I can only speak for myself, but I've often noticed how much better I am at doing things with my right hand than most righties are with their left hands. Living in a righthanded world, we lefties have to learn to use our right hands for a certain number of things, and so we do.

For instance, I mouse with my right hand, a choice I made completely unconsciously many years ago. It's something my more 'stupid' hand is quite capable of, leaving my left hand free to do something requiring more dexterity (sinistry?) - for instance, if I'm jotting down notes on a pad of paper about something on my computer screen, I can write with my left hand as I'm moving things around with the mouse in my right hand. But I don't know any righties who mouse with their left hands; my suspicion is that their left hands are sufficiently unskilled and unused that they don't consider it.

I mouse with my right hand, a choice I made completely unconsciously many years ago.

I did the same, because when you have to share a computer its not efficient to keep moving the mouse around. Now I use my mouse with my right and a Wacom Tablet with my left. That gives me a huge advantage.

As a left handed individual myself, I was one told this by a wise old sage:

"We're all left handed until we sin"

If only all of us lefties could throw a 95 mph fastball, we'd all be millionaires.

As a leftie, life would be easier if I were right-handed. But one learns how to adjust, and in doing so, develop creative and adapting skills earlier in life.

Truman, Ford, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton were left handed. That's 5 of the last 11 Presidents, 4 of the last 6, 3 of the last 4.

In 1992 all three candidates (Bush, Clinton, Perot) were left handed.

In 1996 both Clinton and Dole were, although the latter became one because of war injury.

it's not really a surprise now, is it? (full disclosure, I write left handed and throw right-handed, worst of both worlds)

Left handers are forced to accomodate, and develop their weak sides to thrive, it makes us more complete. Think of your average right hander: what do they use their left hands for? if the left hand was amputated, would they really lose any major functionality? the strict righties I know don't use their left hands for anything at all.

Left handers don't have that chance, we are forced to develop and learn to adapt to a world that isn't perfect for us, from an early age. these are good skills to have in life, if you succeed at them.

My freind's daughter is a lefty - only when she went to a Catholic pre-school, she was "encouraged" to use her right hand. "Because it's such a disadvantage in life to be a lefty."

Typical.

When I fenced in college, the righties thought I had an un-fair advantage.

The mouse thing baffles me. I mouse right and write left, which seems to be the most efficient and effective way to work. My brother, also lefty, mouses left and writes left, which I cannot understand. But the most enigmatic is that almost all righties mouse with their right hand, which seems unproductive and poorly designed. Ever since the PC became part of work life in the Eighties, I have always situated my work space so that I can mouse and write simultaneously.

Being left-handed helped Paul Mirabella and Terry Mulholland have exceptionally long MLB careers (that and Mulholland's superb pickoff move). Salary-wise, it has yet to help me (bachelor's degree, two years' grad school, yet to have a job with a salary over $35K a year).

I noticed not long ago that Jon Stewart is left-handed. And judging from the episode where Jerry & George collaborate on a script, Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander are as well.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

They make more money because they are technical.

I have pleasant memories of a dinner at a National Science Foundation summer program for high school students. We ate at a round table with seven lefties and one righty. We were very mean to him when he bumped elbows.

I regard it as a very important part of being me, much more important than height, not quite as important as gender.

RT,
No, lefties always have an advantage (except in field and track) because you are going up against something different. When playing basketball, you turn at a certain angle towards the other player because that is the arm they use for shooting. Same thing in hockey.

As Hostile said, even when fencing it makes a difference.

Just proves left handed males are liars about what they earn, and most likely about most other things.

Let me ask you this. Why are left handed criminals nicknamed "Lefty?"

I knew your father. I knew your mother. Believe me, you weren't short-changed.

We Lefties have a bigger Corpus callosum, the bus that connects the right and left brain hemispheres.

It means we are smarter than average and process information differently from right-handers, making us more creative as well.

But there is a down side - dyslexia and stuttering.

I thought everybody already knew that lefties were superior.

Righties can keep the current Bush.

We lefties will stick with Matt Groening and Clinton.

DR: the issue can be complicated. In baseball, the platoon effect is real and consistent (that batters perform better against pitchers of the opposite handedness than those of the same handedness). That's great for lefty hitters, since there are more righthanded pitchers than lefthanded. As evidence, 42.3% of the major league baseball plate appearances in 2005 were made by a lefthanded batter.

But it's not so great for lefthanded pitchers, particularly starters, who have to spend the majority of the time pitching against the platoon advantage. 26.8% of the 2005 plate appearances were pitched by a lefty pitcher. Which is still pretty high, admittedly.

Righties have bigger schlongs and more of a bestial mentality to use that primative club to bedazzle the right handed female who look instinctively to the crotch.

. . . WR, RB, TE, CB, S - are in the minority, and for most of those, it's hard to see much advantage coming of handedness.Posted by: RT

As one typically uses both hands as an RB and as a receiver or DB, being left or right handed is pretty meaningless. Furthermore, I would imagine whatever "minority" status one sees for lefties in these positions is probably the same as that observed for the population as a whole.

Ben V-L,

I would like to know more. Because most pitchers are right-handed, teams build in an inordinate number of starting, left-handed hitters. Do you have stats that breaks down the the plate appearances into righty vs. righty, righty vs. lefty, and lefty vs. lefty?

Kevin's post demonstrates that right-handers, like beleaguered Christians and heterosexuals in this country, deserve protection against the hidden left-handed agenda. A Defense of Dexterity Act, perhaps.

and lefties like me are taller too!

The thing I love about washingtonmonthly is that people opine about things they have no expertise in (myself included), without doing any research to back it up.

A quick google search can find this artcle about a study done on sports and left-handed people.

http://www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/sports.html

I'm a lefty as are both my parents and my boyfriend. I don't even like right handed people.

An exceptional number of the top 20 students in my graduating class were left handed. I'm pretty sure southpaws are a bit smarter. Our brains are different. I am definitely ambidextrous - mousing, scissoring, and throwing with my right hand, but my mom ensured that I learn to play tennis left handed because it is seen as an advantage (mainly because your it throws your opponent off a bit).

Do all (most) lefties eat "properly" as in fork in left hand knife in right with no need to switch hands?

This has a certain handedness,

anyone realize MySpace was owned by Fox?

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=46512&Nid=22323&p=329452

Tripp,
Actually, according to this article, the corpus callosum is only bigger in left-handed men, not left-handed women.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-brainsex16jun16,0,5806592,full.story

Ok, so I'm done gloating after this, I swear! When I was a teenager, my father had an ex-golf pro friend teach me how to play right-handed. Since one of the rules of group play is that you can use your partner's clubs, this comes in very handy in a pinch. ok, done. promise.

DR,

Yup. Since I are a man I forgot to specify the gender.

It is tough being a lefty. Seeing the foolishness of one's fellow man and knowing one is helpless to correct it.

Superiority is such a burden.

(sigh)

I wonder if it is lefties or righties that have the bigger balls, in the literal sense. Any experience with that out there?

Wow, what an unbelievable number of PA regulars who are lefties ... I'm kind of astounded, even with the self-selection effect ...

Count me as one, too.

My biggest gripe has been with musical instruments. I had always wanted to get a left-handed bass guitar, but the keyboard-playing friend I wanted to play with was left-handed and used to play right-handed guitar, so he talked me out of it.

Big mistake; I think I would've been a more dexterous player if I could've used my stronger hand for fingering instead of fretting. Also, I always wonder what sort of keyboard player I would've become if there were such a thing as left-handed keyboards.

Maybe my lifelong fascination for bass and rhythmic intricacies comes from having a stronger hand for the low notes ...

Bob

Jill:

Bigger than what?

Bob

The real controversey isn't about which hand they use to write with.

The real controversey is on which side they part their hair.

A few years ago I was doing a research study among persons committed to long psychiatric terms for antisocial behaviors, and noticed a great many more of them were left handed than the population at large. Although I had no funding to pursue this further, it seemed that the more intelligent and charming the sociopaths were (i.e. all the more dangerous) the more likely they were to be left handed

People who are strongly left handed tend to be right brain thinkers. This is more pronounced among males as about 2/3 of males are left brain thinkers, while among females 2/3 are right brain thinkers.

People who are strong left handed also tend to be good with spatial relationships, and tend to be unaffected by motion sickness.

Do all (most) lefties eat "properly" as in fork in left hand knife in right with no need to switch hands?

Me: knife in left, fork in right, no switching. European influence.

Anyone besides me truly ambidextrous? I can switch-hit when playing softball, when I was learnign to skate firure-8's were no problem at all. I can fire a rifle from either shoulder with accuracy - deciding which way to shoot is determined by the placement of the tree that is always between me and the deer. I can also shoot pool right or left handed, and write legibly with my left hand, If I am sitting in a lecture hall and am crowded to my right, I just switch and take my notes with my left.

And when I eat in a formal restaurant, knife in left, fork in right.

They make more money because they are technical.

Not true in my case. I know how technical things work, but I loath to work on them.

I am left handed (ambidextrious) my father is the same, my little brother uber-lefthanded. Both my father and brother are good mechanically, and my brother is uber-technical, he went to work at Intell as a temp and they kept him and then put him through college and now send him all over the world.

I am very conscious of the fact that I do think different than many around me. And frequently it is a real head wind to life in general.

I noticed in law school that that there were very few lefties, and one did not return after the first year. I struggled in law school, which caught me by surprise because I excel in all areas of social sciences.

Law comes easy to those who are good with inductive logic, and is difficult to deductive thinkers.

My degree is in Geography, and I look at atlas' every night to help me relax and go to sleep, including historical atlases. (History is the study of how things vary over time, Geography is how things very over space, so I treat them as the same subject).

I veiw all information spacially or as objects. At certain times its as if I can visualize all my knowledge all at once (which helps me tell jokes because I can relate seemingly vastly different things), like everything I know is pinned up on a bulletin board, and all knowledge has a shape to it, so that I can infer knowledge about something I don't know by the shape of things I do know that surround it - just like with a jigsaw puzzle you can infer the shape of the piece you don't have yet by the pieces you do have.

Additionaly, I frequently 'unbundle' bundled knowledge and look at the parts three dimensionally like taking a carberator out of a car and looking at it from different angles.

I have huge gaps in my knowledge too. I can't spell and I am horrible with grammar (yet I am good at communicating concepts and ideas making analogies) and I don't like math. I can program computers but not with speed. I am circumspectual, but not lineal or sequential in my thought processes, which I suppose hurt me in law school.

Perhaps it was Geography that did it to me, but I look for general trends, and loath having to go into the details unless it is important in the general ttheme of things, another thing that probably hurt me in law school.

I am quit certain, left handed people think different about things, perhaps its "holistic" as well as "spatial" - they convert all info into objects that have a spatial quality to them.

Most of the great generals in history were lefties: Alexander, Ceasar, Napolean. I expect, a lot of the great writers to be also, though the only ones I know of are Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin, though I wouldn't be surprised if Shakespear would turn out to have been left handed (I tend to think that Shakespeare's work was a collaborative effort ie. not just him alone - he had imput from his fellow actors on how to improve his work).

Me: knife in left, fork in right, no switching. European influence. Posted by: RSA

"European influence," huh? Try good 'ol American Lil' Abner and Daisy Mae School of Charm and Eddie-cut! That's backwards, Clem.

European Style

The European, or "Continental," style of using knife and fork is somewhat more efficient, and its practice is also common in the United States, where left-handed children are no longer forced to learn to wield a fork with their right hands. According to this method, the fork is held continuously in the left hand and used for eating. When food must be cut, the fork is used exactly as in the American style, except that once the bite has been separated from the whole, it is conveyed directly to the mouth on the downward-facing fork. Regardless of which style is used to operate fork and knife, it is important never to cut more than one or two bites at one time.

http://www.cuisinenet.com/glossary/use.html

People who are strong left handed also tend to be good with spatial relationships, and tend to be unaffected by motion sickness.

Posted by: Harry

I am left handed and I easily get motion sickness. I can't go on most rides at six flags. I will not only get sick but I can be sick for days afterwards.

I think that motion sickness may be a function of the size of the brain versus the brain pan it sits in. If you giggle your head the brain slaps against the wall of the brain pan and that's what I think causes motion sickness.

this race is about to get interesting

Democrats Back Lamont; Lieberman Files for Independent Run

"We're better looking, too."

Not only that, we're much better lovers, can write in Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic far easier than our right-handed counterparts, and are superior cooks.

As a matter of fact, I'm doing all of the above even as I post this, which also shows that left-handed people are more likely to multi-task than right-handers.

"European influence," huh? Try good 'ol American Lil' Abner and Daisy Mae School of Charm and Eddie-cut! That's backwards, Clem.

No shit, Sherlock. Lefties often do things mirror-image of righties; this is one of 'em.

I thought everyone knew this. Left handed folks are over represented at both ends of the spectrum.

If you restricted the data set to folks that didn't graduate from highschool you'd see the opposite trend. Of course, there are a few lefties out there that can't tell you their name let alone their handedness.

"European influence," huh? Try good 'ol American Lil' Abner and Daisy Mae School of Charm and Eddie-cut! That's backwards, Clem.

No shit, Sherlock. Lefties often do things mirror-image of righties; this is one of 'em.
Posted by: RSA

Nice try, Clem.

One interesting effect we observed in college was that left handers (like me) tend to eat corn on the cob by going around the cob, in a more or less helical pettern, right handers go across, "typewriter" style. We found very few exceptions to this rule. For example, I'm the only left hander in my family and the only one to eat corn using the helical pattern.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that MIT students do for fun. Go MIT, #1 again!!

I am left handed . . . .
I am very . . .
I noticed . . . .
I struggled . . .
I excel in . . .
I look at atlas' . . .
I treat them . . . .
I veiw all information . . .
I can visualize . . .
I can relate . . .
I can infer . . .
I frequently . . .
I have huge . . .
I am horrible w. . .
yet I am good at . . .
I don't like math.
I can program . . .
I am circumspectual . . .
I look for . . .
I am quit certain . . .
I expect, a lot . . .
I wouldn't be surprised . . .
I tend to think. . .
Posted by: Bubbles on August 9, 2006 at 5:45 PM | PERMALINK

Everyone, meet Bubbles. (whispers:) Bubbles likes to talk about herself a lot.

I'm a lefty and I have married two left handed men (not at the same time). I have always assumed that my cat was left pawed. I identify more as a left handed person than I do has a Jew.

I betcha most trolls are righties.

Just riffing on previous remarks re ambidexterity:

I am definitely right-hand dominant; but in most cases I can use either hand with equal facility. However, there are some things I simply can't do with my left hand: use chopsticks, tie a shoe or throw a baseball.

When Doughy Pantload is in a cheating mood, he does it with his left hand.

Of course, there are a few lefties out there that can't tell you their name let alone their handedness.Perhaps http://www.ggpt.info/sitemap.htm it was Geography that did it to me, but I look for general trends, and loath having to go into the details unless it is important in the general ttheme of things, another thing that probably hurt me in law school.

Good evening. Working hard, in this busy time for you called. This is my friend and the Boke,just established, the time is not long. The issue here isthat everybody can see my Boke, Ha-ha, raising some visibility, which caused trouble to ask your forgiveness! We all hope to see. Please! 笑傲苍穹博客 晚秋稻草博客 绽放笑容 寂寞无痕博客 思念秋风博客 谷歌和百度的博客 小城故事专栏 流淌的河水 月是故乡明 拥有幸福 爱是什么 笑傲江湖 真爱无敌 幽默坏蛋博客 醉看红尘 诱惑的雨夜 热的发抖 记忆中的故乡 独自去徘徊 都市流浪人 漂泊的船 生命的感悟 秋日的午后 笑看天下 落花无泪

This is evidence of discrimination against right handers.

http://www.ggpt.info/sitemap.htm

Ignore the previous link. Just confused by it's insertion in a previous comment.

I look for general trends, and loath having to go into the details unless it is important in the general ttheme of things

It likely is important. The article kevin linked to discussed college educated left handers. The following article discusses a ~ 10 fold higher frequency of severe learning disabilities in the left handed population in general. I'm not sure whether this is still unrefuted or explained better in more recent literature. The stongest link is with subtypes of autism.

-----------------------
Left-Handedness: Association with Immune Disease, Migraine, and Developmental Learning Disorder

Norman Geschwind and Peter Behan

PNAS | August 15, 1982 | vol. 79 | no. 16 | 5097-5100

I remember an old economist piece somewhere about how lefties were more effectively violent. Maybe we just eliminate our competition.

As far as the sports things go, I've had an advantage in every sport I've played from it. I current play competitive ultimate, and being able break the mark with just a step is very very useful. Breakmark outside in hucks all day long. In basketball, you obviously need both hands, but being different from most dribblers is a pretty sizable advantage. Does any one really think Ginobili would be quite as good as he is if he wasn't left handed? Baseball, advantage is fairly obvious. In soccer, I've always felt very confident with both my feet, and I guess I could attribute this to an early development of ambidexterity. I don't know that it helps much in football, though being able to use both hands is probably a bit helpful for catching.

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