Surprising Facts About Left-Handed People

Most of the world is right-handed and don’t understand the challenges of being a lefty in a righty’s world. Various studies on the biological and psychological effects of being a lefty have been conducted, with some focused on its evolutionary impact.

1. More Often are Male
Men make up for 23% more than women in the left-handed population, according to a study conducted in 2008. The study consisted of around 144 studies with a sample participant size of about two million people.

2. Advantageous Hand at Sports
Lefties have a particular advantage over righties in certain sports, like fencing, boxing, tennis, baseball, and swimming. Righties are more used to playing against other righties, which may throw them off their game a little when they have to play against a leftie. For example, a batter in baseball is more likely to be more accustomed to pitches by a righty, so they are more likely to miss when receiving a pitch by a lefty. This is especially seen as more prevalent in Tennis, where around 40% of the current top players are lefties.

3. More Intelligent Than Right
Lefties have heterogeneous brain organization, where they can process verbal information using both sides of the brain. At the same time, righties have a more organized brain division, where the right hemisphere takes care of visuospatial processing, and the left hemisphere handles the verbal processing. Since lefties can process oral information on both sides of the brain, they can process larger amounts of data and have higher intelligence levels than righties.

4. More Artistic
Lefties are more artistic as their dominant hemisphere controls the awareness of art, creativity, and imagination. They are also more partial to visual information over language-based.

5. A “Sinister” Reputation
Lefties have a pretty negative reputation in cultural history worldwide. Lefties were often seen as weak, unlucky, corrupt, and sometimes even associated with evil. The word “sinister” is even derived from the Latin word “sinister,” which means “left.”

6.Better at Driving
A study has found that left-handed people are better drivers than righties. They found that lefties are involved in far fewer accidents than righties. An AA Driving School conducted a poll and found that while 47 righties passed their driving test the first time, 57 lefties passed on the first try.

7.Left Handed People Use the Right Side of the Brain the Most
The brain is cross-wired, meaning that the right side controls the left side of the body and vice versa. Hence the well-known saying ‘only left handed people are in their right minds’. The right-hand side of the brain is thought to coordinate the left side of the body and control tasks to do with the arts and creativity.

8.More Likely To Be Alcoholics
A 1973 paper by psychologist Paul Bakan ‘Left-handedness and alcoholism‘ noted that a higher than expected number of patients in an alcoholism ward were left handed.

9.Better Multi-Taskers
Left-handed people have always had to face challenges in life regarding handedness, so they have always had to think quickly to solve their problems. The communication between the two hemispheres in a lefties brain has much better communication, making it much easier for them to focus on more than one activity and multi-task.

10.Better at Video Games
Australian Professor Dr. Nick Cherbuin discovered that left-handed people could outperform right-handed people in complex or fast tasks. Their reaction times were better, making them much better at gaming.