Life-Ticker of A Thoughtful Observer

Being a Lefty Helped Barack Obama Win The Election!

January 22, 2009 at 8:17 pm (Just for Fun, Personal, Political) (Fun Facts, Lefty, News, Obama, Political, Random, Signing, Writing)

So i was watching a news clip about Obama ordering the closing of Guantanamo Bay and I noticed something interesting. Barack Obama is left handed! 

I thought that was interesting and it made me recall something about lefties being smarter than righties…

So I turned to Wikipedia. Lo and behold! Here is what I found.

1. Left-handedness and politics
   Though constituting less than 10 percent of the general population, five of the last seven U.S presidents have been left-handed: Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Barack Obama’s opponent in the 2008 election, John McCain, is also left-handed.

2. Left-handedness and intelligence
   1. In his book Right-Hand, Left-Hand,^[34] Chris McManus of University College London argues that the proportion of left-handers is rising and left-handed people as a group have historically produced an above-average quota of high achievers. He says that left-handers’ brains are structured differently in a way that widens their range of abilities, and the genes that determine left-handedness also govern development of the language centres of the brain.
   2. McManus also says that the increase in the 20th century of people identifying as left-handed could produce a corresponding intellectual advance and a leap in the number of mathematical, sporting, or artistic geniuses.
   3. In 2006, researchers at Lafayette College and Johns Hopkins University in a study found that left-handed men are 15 percent richer than right-handed men for those who attended college, and 26 percent richer if they graduated. The wage difference is still unexplainable and does not appear to apply to women.^[35]
3. Possible effects in humans on thinking
   1. There are many theories on how being left-handed affects the way a person thinks. One theory divides left- and right-handed thinkers into two camps: visual simultaneous vs. linear sequential.^{[45][46][47][48]}

      According to this theory, right-handed people are thought to process information using a “linear sequential” method in which one thread must complete its processing before the next thread can be started.

      Left-handed persons are thought to process information using a “visual simultaneous” method in which several threads can be processed simultaneously. Another way to view this is such: Suppose there were one thousand pieces of popcorn and one of them was colored blue. Right-handed people—using the linear sequential processing style—would look at the popcorn one at a time until they encountered the blue one. The left-handed person would spread out the pieces of popcorn and look at all of them to find the one that was blue. A side effect of these differing styles of processing is that right-handers need to complete one task before they can start the next. Left-handers, by contrast, are capable and comfortable switching between tasks. This seems to suggest that left-handed people have an excellent ability to multi-task, and anecdotal evidence that they are more creative may stem from this ability to multi-task.

      Right-handed people process information using “analysis“, which is the method of solving a problem by breaking it down to its pieces and analyzing the pieces one at a time. By contrast, left-handed people process information using “synthesis“, which is the method of solving a problem by looking at the whole and trying to use pattern-matching to solve the problem.^[48]

      The hypothesis that left-handed people are predisposed to visual-based thought has been validated by a variety of evidence. In the 2004 book Brains That Work a Little Bit Differently^[49], researchers Allen D. Bragdon and David Gamon, Ph.D., briefly described some of the current research on handedness and its significance. “Handedness researchers Coren and Clare Porac have shown that left-handed university students are more likely to major in visually-based, as opposed to language-based subjects. Another sample of 103 art students found anastounding 47 percent were left- or mixed-handed.” [page 76]

      Ultimately, being left-handed is not an all-or-nothing situation. The processing styles operate on a continuum where some people are more visual-simultaneous and others are more linear-sequential.

(all info is from Wikipedia)

So any other lefties out there? I would love to know if you guys also process things visually and simultaneously. Let me know!

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