Posted on 08/13/2015 10:32:43 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
Diana Deutsch is a perceptual researcher who made discoveries about left-handedness and pitch perception.
Her more important discovery is that people who grow up speaking tonal languages like Mandarin have a greater advantage in the pitch component of musicality.
About left-handedness, her findings:
40% of the 10% of the population who are left handed, have a brain neurology that is just an opposite mirror of the 90% of right handers.
60% of left-handers, the people who have a higher proportion of perfect pitch, have “mixed hand preference”, in which they will switch off between hands for common tasks (switch hitters).
(My father broke his left hand, learned to write right handed, and never switched back once the arm was healed.)
Mixed-hand preference lefties have an over-active corpus callosum, the interface between brain hemispheres, the structure that is deliberately damaged in lobotomy.
They have greater communication between sides, perhaps an improper freedom of movement of impulses.
They have higher rates of perfect pitch, artistic temperament, and insanity.
Aye, sinistral one here!
my daughter is left handed, I’m not.
I’m left-handed and I can tell you my pitch perception was pretty good for balls low around the knees and high on the outer part of the plate. The high outside pitch was usually an opposite field double down the line while the low pitch went a long way to deep right center field.
I had no perception of the fastball high and tight.
Don’t trust righty...
Being a left handed person, I got to experience extra tender mercies from the educational system trying to convert me. School was miserable.
I can believe the rest of the stats.
I can’t make a move with my left hand. Can’t go left.
I am married to a left hander and mother to another and grandmother to several (about 5) including a 2 year old who hasn’t quite decided yet and a switch hitting baseball player.
A long time ago I noticed that my husband and I have totally different “takes” on how to approach a multifaceted task — order of steps, etc. This used to drive me crazy, but now I just accept it.
This trait really came to the fore when I was part of a quilting guild. At our meetings, we’d sit around a quilt frame and sew, after we’d shared new patterns and methods with each other. There were several women who used to trade seats with others so that their left elbows were at the ends of the frame. I noticed that those were the women who (on their own) had developed innovative ways to miter a corner, or to assemble a square or a quilt top. Those women were the most creative members and most of them eventually published books on their methods.
One of my left handers has perfect pitch, but so does one of my right handers.
Left Handed Presidents since 1923:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States
I think that “perfect pitch” means music.
I feel your pain. My 2nd grade teacher was awful about it. Then of course, there are the scissors that never cut, spiral notebooks we can never completely fill, ink and pencil lead from the tip of your pinky to your wrist, and don’t get me started on gel pens....
I was on a bowling league as a kid. They had bowling instructors there but I was on my own. They didn’t know where to begin showing a lefty how to bowl haha.
#LeftHandsMatter
Left-pawed dogs are believed to have keener senses of smell and to exhibit superior task performance behavior.
I’m left-handed. My oldest sister was left-handed. Both my sons are right-handed.
My husband never saw a “left handed” desk in school until he got to college. Learning to write, he always got called out by the teacher for grubby papers. Unless you hold the paper sideways, your left hand always drags across what has just been written — a distinct disadvantage if you are writing with a soft pencil, or with a pen and real ink (as we had to learn to do in school).
And.....
I'm ambidextrous....
My wife and I were both left-handed. I write, throw, shoot and play drums left-handed but I bat, golf and play guitar and violin right-handed. Is that weird or a usual occurance?
Back when I went to grammar school, I learned to write normally even though I’m left-handed. I don’t curl my hand around and do the crab-crawl across the page like Bambi.
My daughter is left-handed (as is her uncle and grandfather on her dad’s side). She never has been able to cut with scissors. We did get a pair of left-handed shearers, which helped some, but she is still cutting-impaired.
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