Loading ...I’m a ‘lefty’ also. I remember learning to write the alphabet at home from my mom before first grade. I was trying it with both hands. I remember asking mom which hand I should use, and she told me to use which ever one feels best. I settled on my left hand. (Mom was progressive and ‘allowing’ back in 1950.) I eat left, but I bat and golf (poorly) right-handed, so there is an element of ambidexterity there. I have met many native Japanese who were ‘changed’ at childhood, forced to write right-handed. (Japanese society is ‘homogenized’ by strict training. They have a saying that ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered flat’ to explain this. Many of these ‘forced change’ people have trouble with dyslexia also) But in the mostly Asian and very ‘allowing’ culture of Aloha I found in Hawaii, I have met more left-handed people than I have experienced anywhere else.
A childhood schoolmate that I still keep in frequent touch with became interested in consciousness and the brain. He became a skilled EEG (brainwave) tech that tells the brain surgeons where to operate. We have shared many stories and observations over a lifetime. They have discovered that lefties and ambidextrous people have a larger bundle of nerves connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Typically the mechanical, motor drive functions are concentrated in one side, and the subconscious or dreaming side of the brain is the other side. People who are ‘left’ are typically more prone to ambidextrous because the two halves of the brain are able to better communicate between the halves. The result is that the ‘dreaming’ side is able to translate things into motor-skill functions on the mechanical side of the brain. We are better able to use both halves of the brain more effectively. This results in our being able to score higher on IQ and intelligence tests. Einstein was left-handed.
The most extreme person I ever met was a fellow tech & engineer type who had a problem with identity theft… someone forged his checks. So he changed his signature on his bank records. He would write his name in script… backwards. You could hold the check up to a mirror and read the perfect script of his name. The stunning part was that he could do this with EITHER hand… it made no difference to him. He was also extremely dyslexic and had to carefully manage that, because left-right symmetry was the same to him. I remember him wiring a complex terminal block of 25 wires that were color-coded, but he wired it from right-to-left instead of the other way. Perfect color order… just completely backwards… and he didn’t realize it until I pointed it out to him. Humorously he just shrugged and asked “what’s the difference?” I had to swat him and make him do it over! He’s still a good friend, living in another country now, and we keep in touch. He is one of the most interesting ‘brains’ I have known in a lifetime.
I have long known that I think and perceive things differently than most people. It used to frustrate me that people could not see or understand what was completely obvious to me. I was never told my IQ scores in school. But a self-test that I tried (and sloppily, by my own estimate) revealed to me that I have a low-genius level IQ. But I have never considered myself arrogantly ‘superior’ to others…. I felt I was just ‘different’.