You wrote,
>He's in a class of 18, about 1/3 of whom are left-handed. I've started
asking questions of left-handed parents and there are many similar
experiences among our children, like wanting to open a book at the back,
perfect mirror-image writing from right to left, stuff like that. Of
course, there are many divergences also.
>
>Strange stuff.
Strange to whom? Certainly not to a leftie like me, who grew up
"play-writing" as a child from right to left, writes mirror image, reads
upside down, backwards and mirror-image (print, mostly), started off
opening books at the back, and when putting multi-volume sets on my
bookshelf orders them right to left. (Fortunately one of my languages is
Hebrew, so I do occasionally get to read and write the right - i.e.
leftie - way.) When writing in English I also hold the page almost
sideways and write upwards, which solves the
hand-dragging-over-the-writing problem with less strain than hooking and
writing virtually upside down. Of course I've also spent my life dealing
with doors that open the wrong way, computer keyboards with the number
pad on the wrong side, and there's always the problem that you righties
can't make a functional pair of scissors....
Need I say it's all relative? On the other hand I do believe that many
lefties of the familiar/inherited variety do think "differently." When I
draw a blank on what seems perfectly obvious to your standard rightie, or
they draw a blank on what seems perfectly obvious to me, I explain it by
saying, "Well, I'm left-handed and my brain is installed sideways." One
advantage that many lefties have is equal facility with both language and
spatial skills, which is why so many of us are in fields like computer
programming. On the other hand, many of us do tend to be a little
socially thick on occasion. I think this probably is commoner with
lefties who are right-brained or equally-distributed for language, and
relates to the fact that most of the knowledge we need to get along
socially is learned implicitly, i.e. "right-brained." When both
hemispheres are preoccupied with language, perhaps this type of learning
is interfered with. I know that I could never figure out the point of
"small talk" until one day I read Hayakawa's discussion of it in
"Language in Thought and Action" and said Aha! it does have a function.
Better learn how to do this.... So I observed people making small talk,
and then tried doing it on my own. I did succeed, but the whole process
was maybe a little counter-intuitive for your average rightie.
I also sometimes, especially when tired, have trouble telling my right
hand from my left, and there are a few things I do better with the right
hand, like playing "kugelach," which is the Israeli version of jacks.
(My left-handed niece finds this is also true for her.) Interestingly, I
have been learning to draw using "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain"
and find that even though my laterality seems to be somewhat scrambled, I
definitely do use the two different types of processing the author
describes, so they do exist, but not as strict functions of hemispheric
differences.
In some ways one can say that purely right-handed people are deprived of
the opportunity to meet unusual situations creatively, since the world
already comes designed for their unthinking use, and they never get a
chance to develop new strategies. (For instance, one of the right-handed
boys in my junior high class developed mirror righting as a "secret
language," but he was a generally creative type.)
I have a theory that society needs two types of people - the great mass
of goers-along who provide necessary social stability and a smaller group
of unorganizable innovative types who while distressing their more
conventional neighbors, provide the psycho-social equivalent of
biodiversity so that the society doesn't stagnate or succumb to
unexpected challenges. Thus we lefties have a long-term advantage for
society as a whole, even though short-term we come in for a lot of
personal inconvenience (not to mention people accusing us of being
addiction-prone, etc.)
This is a great thread, and I've seen a lot of things that I've run
across in my own private research over the years, not to mention personal
experience as one of a long line of ambidextrous and left-handed types.
Yes, we do "think funny" - but don't knock it - it takes all kinds to
make the world go 'round.
Sinistrally,
Rochel Sara Heckert
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