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Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

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Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#221

Post by voidUpdate »

p00dles wrote: post #140
didibus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why handed vs ambidextrous Did it even explain that? I'm ambidextrous, I have no handedness bias, so whichever I pick up to first learn something is the hand I use. So I'm a mix of left-handed and right-handed depending on the task. And yet I didn't really understand why that's odd because of my bipedalism?

There is also a category of people who are “mixed-handed”, who have a strong handedness preference for a given task, but which hand one prefers varies based on the task. I didn’t know about this category until recently, but it describes my personal experience. Mildly informative Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dominance

Isn't that normal? I'm very strongly left handed, but I will often carry heavy things with my right hand

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#222

Post by voidUpdate »

pixl97 wrote: post #148
nmstoker wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All our maths teachers were at school were left handed, along with 25% of the top maths set in our year. The teacher and student population of left handed people were close to the normal 10% levels too.

Autistic people are 2 to 3 times more likely to be left handed than the general population.

Do you know about the ambidextrous rates too?

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#223

Post by technothrasher »

Tor3 wrote: post #174
Vachyas wrote: post #151

An interesting anecdote that comes to mind is playing old computer games with arrow keys, which used my right hand. I got pretty proficient with this. Over the years, I (and I imagine many others) switched over to WASD to play newer games with mouse + keyboard, but this meant using the left hand for "arrow keys" Now I can directly compare how proficient I am with WASD vs Arrow Keys and the result surprised me. I was…

I'm right-handed, I'm pretty sure of that. But it's also an observed fact that if there's something I'm not used to to yet then it doesn't really matter which hand I start doing whatever it is with, if it's the right hand that'll be the preferred hand for that activity in the future, or if it's the left hand then that'll be the one. Things I do "both ways" I can do.. both ways.

I've found the same thing. I'm quite left handed for most things, including writing and throwing. But when I learned to shoot rifles, I learned right handed because 1) otherwise the ejected brass can hit you, and 2) I'm right eye dominant and its easier to shoot without crossed hand and eye. So now it feels very strange to shoot any gun left handed. But things like using a mouse or a stick shift car RHD vs LHD, I can use either hand and it doesn't much matter.

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#224

Post by postexitus »

wvh wrote: post #207
Vachyas wrote: post #151

An interesting anecdote that comes to mind is playing old computer games with arrow keys, which used my right hand. I got pretty proficient with this. Over the years, I (and I imagine many others) switched over to WASD to play newer games with mouse + keyboard, but this meant using the left hand for "arrow keys" Now I can directly compare how proficient I am with WASD vs Arrow Keys and the result surprised me. I was…

I've been playing guitar since I was a little kid. I wonder how learning "two-handed" skills such as playing music impacts how "handy" or "polydextrous" one is. There are left-handed guitar players that play right-handed, such as Nick Johnston, who claim the gaps in their technique or preference for certain left-hand-only techniques are informed by being left-handed; so it seems that a life-long of an insane amount o…

Some of the best guitarists I have met are left-handed playing right-handed guitar ones. Which also makes sense - The more difficult part of playing the guitar is not fingering/picking, it's the fretboard. By using their dominant hand on the fretboard they have a genuine advantage. I've never understood why we formed the right handed guitar to have the dominant hand on the body. There must be a reason.

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#225

Post by tso »

kazinator wrote: post #158

Why is there handedness on stringed instruments? If you're right handed, you strum a guitar with your right hand, fret with the left. But both are fine motor skills requiring coordination. Left handed players go out of their way to acommodate doing it the other way around; either finding left-handed instruments (challenge: most things they might like/want are not available in lefty version) or suffer with a flipped r…

Strumming/picking requires significantly more (and more frequent) motor control than fretting. Most music will only use a handful of notes/chords, but multiple strumming/picking patterns which need to be performed on precise timings. Your strumming hand is often doing an order of magnitude more precise motions than your fretting hand.

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#226

Post by rimworld »

liquidise wrote: post #33
NickC25 wrote: post #14

What does it say for mixed-handed folks like myself (different skillsets per hand - in other words, throw and write with different hands)? What about cross-dominance (different body parts differ on dominant side - in other words, a right-handed person being left-foot dominant)? I've been told that it's effectively a mental illness if discovered during childhood (as is ambidexterity). Yet I can't help but think that i…

Left-footed and right-handed. I find my "handedness" follows where the activity is driven from (upper/lower body). Soccer, snowboarding, batting, golfing: lefty Writing, throwing, tennis, pool: righty

true, with snowboarding, I still don't know which leg to lead with...

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#227

Post by dmos62 »

inejge wrote: post #206
prox wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah fun fact, why do we use the word “right” and “left” but also use the word “right” as correct/lawful and use left as thing that is well, left? A linguist theory says that people always been predominantly right handed, so the way you use tools is the “right” (correct) hand, and the one you don’t, well it’s the hand that is “left”. It’s how the word also became the word for directions as well.

> Ah fun fact, why do we use the word “right” and “left” but also use the word “right” as correct/lawful and use left as thing that is well, left? A linguist theory says that people always been predominantly right handed, so the way you use tools is the “right” (correct) hand, and the one you don’t, well it’s the hand that is “left”. It's a bit more varied, even in the Indo-European family. What does tend to happen i…

Latin languages also have the words sinister, izquierdo (which seems to come from esku-okerr - crooked hand) for left.

The tendency to associate the right with positive and the left with negative is pretty much ubiquitous in Western civilization up until fairly recently.

I have a fairly exotic viewpoint on this. The left/right asymmetry (for the lack of a better term) is a small part of a larger asymmetry that's difficult to explain (at least to my satisfaction): up is better than down, light is better than dark, positive is better than negative, higher human faculties are better than lower desires, right is better than left. In my mind, none of these should inherently have a good/bad association. Is a valley worse than a hill? Is a positive electric charge better than a negative one? But, for some reason we have this cultural, linguistic baggage where what seem like highly abstract objects are rooted in a very basic world of good and bad.

I find this fascinating.

I would go as far as to add the male/female asymmetry to this: seemingly senseless, yet historically present. I'd say the rabbit hole truly starts when you get into Western esotherics and see how they associate right, up, light, male, order, knowledge as if they're different expressions of the same thing, and analogously for left, down, dark, etc.

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#228

Post by AlecSchueler »

postexitus wrote: post #224
wvh wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing guitar since I was a little kid. I wonder how learning "two-handed" skills such as playing music impacts how "handy" or "polydextrous" one is. There are left-handed guitar players that play right-handed, such as Nick Johnston, who claim the gaps in their technique or preference for certain left-hand-only techniques are informed by being left-handed; so it seems that a life-long of an insane amount o…

Some of the best guitarists I have met are left-handed playing right-handed guitar ones. Which also makes sense - The more difficult part of playing the guitar is not fingering/picking, it's the fretboard. By using their dominant hand on the fretboard they have a genuine advantage. I've never understood why we formed the right handed guitar to have the dominant hand on the body. There must be a reason.

> The more difficult part of playing the guitar is not fingering/picking, it's the fretboard.

I would have said the opposite. The fretting hand only needs to press onto the strings in the correct places whereas the picking hand is responsible for all the subtlety of expression in terms of how you attack the string.

Saying this as a professional mandolin player fwiw.

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#229

Post by Gravityloss »

inejge wrote: post #206
prox wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah fun fact, why do we use the word “right” and “left” but also use the word “right” as correct/lawful and use left as thing that is well, left? A linguist theory says that people always been predominantly right handed, so the way you use tools is the “right” (correct) hand, and the one you don’t, well it’s the hand that is “left”. It’s how the word also became the word for directions as well.

> Ah fun fact, why do we use the word “right” and “left” but also use the word “right” as correct/lawful and use left as thing that is well, left? A linguist theory says that people always been predominantly right handed, so the way you use tools is the “right” (correct) hand, and the one you don’t, well it’s the hand that is “left”. It's a bit more varied, even in the Indo-European family. What does tend to happen i…

As a native non Indo European language speaker, aware of the many differences to Indo European languages, it is noteworthy that this however is similar in both. Oikea ja vasen, right and left. Oikea ja väärä, right and wrong.

In clothing you have the right side and the reverse side while here it's oikea ja nurja. Again similarities but nurja has this twisted and dark connotation. Or upside down = nurinperin.

Re: Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

#230

Post by jcarrano »

Magi604 wrote: post #114

I almost never see people using a left hand mouse these days. As younger people start using computers they generally will learn with right-handed mice and will thus develop those fine motor skills in that hand. I wonder if this will make right-handedness even more dominant.

At one point I used to have two mice plugged in and would use either one depending on which hand was free.
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