Does the Future Belong to the Left-Handed?

From Wikipedia:  “Studies of dogs, horses, and domestic cats have shown that females of those species tend to be right-handed, while males are left-handed.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness).

It’s increasingly hard to believe what you read these days. I was surprised by the above statement, not because dogs, horses and cats prefer to use one hand or another, but rather that they have hands in the first place.

Speaking offhandedly, practically all the literature available on lefties and righties leaves you ambidextrous, or at least ambivalent (see for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3897366/).

Left handed people either live longer or maybe they don’t, they have more diseases or perhaps they don’t, are more prone to accidents or not, are cleverer or not, better or worse at sports, make more money or don’t, and so on. It’s hard to know who is right.

Someone even suggested that left-handed men are better at multitasking. Hey, I’m a left handed man and I can barely handle one task. I am having trouble writing this article.

On the other hand, I am a wunderadult when it comes to typing. I am super-fast. You might think that it’s because my Mom sent me to summer typing class (the girls were cute and staring at them was the best way to learn blind typing). It’s not just that though.  It’s because the QWERTY keyboard has given lefties an unfair advantage.

The folks who designed the original keyboard wanted to slow down the mechanical arms, or type bars (so they wouldn’t collide). They put a lot of really useful letters on the left hand side to slow down the vast majority of right handed typists. Yippee for us. Did you know that 3,000 words can be typed using the left hand alone, as opposed to only 300 for righties (I am taking this at face value, people)?

I think that there are two main problems associated with handedness research. The first is that handedness is a spectrum, and may result from a wide variety of biological phenomena that have little to do with one another.  In addition to handedness, there is also footedness, eye dominance, and ear dominance which are all related to some extent or other.  Future research, in my opinion has to start with learning to identify lefties by their brain processes as well as which hand they write with.

The second problem is “So what?” and “Who cares about them in the first place?” After all, now that we don’t excommunicate sinister lefties, it no longer appears relevant. Southpaws are like everyone else who never master scissors, can’t find good baseball gloves and use their weak foot to manipulate the gas and brake pedals of the cars they drive. What do they want from the 90% majority? To manufacture backwards violins and invent smudge-free pens?

But hold your horses. Enter the relatively new discussion on future employability – in particular the discourse on those who have special neurological capabilities previously considered a ‘disability’ which may become a professional advantage in the future (so called “coolabilities”). In a world in which the genetics, and physiological traits accompanying left handedness are better understood, lefties may gain the upper hand (so to speak) in a work environment searching for the uncommon (see also https://swarajyamag.com/culture/puzzles-and-paradoxes-the-case-for-lefties).

In an environment in which everything works and is taught backwards, lefties invent their own ways to cope. When they encounter difficulties with tasks that appear straightforward, such as tying shoes, they invent their own techniques.  In a sense lefties are bilingual – they learn to adopt the ‘language’ of the right-handed world as well as their own.

So isn’t it about time that researchers took a closer look at left-handedness as a coolability and started to study how lefties can impact the future of employment, education and technology? You bet.