Posted on 05/07/2025 6:32:08 AM PDT by Towed_Jumper
In a nutshell:
Left-handed and mixed-handed people appear significantly more often in certain mental and neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and schizophrenia, with mixed-handedness showing the strongest association.
Three factors predict higher rates of unusual handedness: neurodevelopmental conditions, disorders with early onset, and conditions affecting language function.
Not all mental health conditions show this pattern—depression, dyscalculia, and pedophilia showed no significant differences in handedness compared to the general population.
Left-handed people appear significantly more often among those with certain mental and neurodevelopmental disorders, according to groundbreaking research that analyzed data from over 200,000 individuals. This connection potentially offers a window into how our brains develop and organize themselves.
The study, published in Psychological Bulletin, revealed that conditions like schizophrenia, autism, and intellectual disability show notably higher rates of left-handedness compared to the general population. While about 10% of people worldwide are left-handed, autism cases were 3.5 times more likely to exhibit non-right-handedness than control groups.
Even conditions like dyslexia and stuttering showed significantly higher rates of left-handedness.
“Language, like handedness, has a very one-sided location in the brain, so it stands to reason that the development of both and their disorders could be linked,” says lead researcher Julian Packheiser from Ruhr University Bochum, in a statement.
By combining data from ten previous meta-analyses, representing 402 datasets, researchers identified patterns across different diagnoses that had previously remained hidden when studying disorders in isolation.
(Excerpt) Read more at studyfinds.org ...
Me too, except my K-3rd grade teachers were nuns (of the original austere and disciplined "penguin" variety). Nevertheless, I persevered and grew up to be a fairly well-adjusted Lefty.
Seeing how you're both a Redhead and a Lefty, just be glad you weren't born in some rural, backwater village sometime during early Middle Ages -they might have drowned you in a bucket of water!
The struggle is real.
LOL, that’s what my dad and husband said. I got by easy with just the bullying. I was SO ugly when I was around 7 and got bullied for that and for the hair. Ten years later you wouldn’t have known I was the same kid. 😁 I wouldn’t have survived the Middle Ages.
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