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Whatsapp Once considered a mark of degeneracy, left-handedness is increasingly seen as a sign of creativity and difference, at least in the west

Being left-handed has come a long way. These days it's even considered the sign of a creative mind. Yet so many questions about left-handedness remain unanswered, from its causes to the meaning of its relationship with autism and Tourette's syndrome.

For centuries, left-handers were despised and persecuted around the world. The negative attitudes left a legacy in many languages: think of the undertones of 'gauche', deriving from the French word for left, or 'sinister', which means the same in Latin. Even in Chinese, the word zuo is a synonym for unorthodox or wrong.

The greatest harm to being left-handed is not being left-handed but the way people treat left-handers.

There's not a language in the world where left-handedness does not have a negative connotation, according to Howard Kushner, a public health professor at Emory University in Atlanta, who has spent years studying the misunderstood trait. And while it's considered a relatively benign characteristic in the west today, he suspects the stigma against 'sinistrality' persists elsewhere.

'In China, officials claim that there are less than 1 per cent left-handers. But we know that for Chinese children who move from China to a western country, their rates of left-handedness approach those of westerners,' Kushner says.

'Essentially, wherever there's a low rate of left-handers, one would suppose there is probably discrimination against them.'

Kushner thinks this is typical of the discrimination people with differences have suffered 'from the beginning of time til now'.

'Generally what happens, especially if the difference is a minority, is to tie them to the negative,' he says.

'Left-handers were seen as negative and right-handers were seen as positive. It's the sacred versus the profane—everything sacred, you use your right hand for, and everything profane, you use your left hand for.'

The ancient superstitions took a turn towards the scientific in the early 20th century, as psychology and psychiatry grew in prominence. One Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, asserted that left-handedness was associated with feeble-mindedness, mental illness and criminality. This was part of his theory of 'criminal atavism', which sought to explain various anatomical and behavioural characteristics by suggesting some people were insufficiently evolved from their primitive ancestors.

'He particularly pointed to people who were left-handed, saying that left-handedness was a sign that the genes of these primitive peoples were still manifesting themselves in left-handers,' Kushner says.

'He didn't think you could change it; some people thought you could change it. He said they just had to breed it out of the population.'

Retraining the hands

The French anthropologist Robert Hertz—a student of the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim—favoured an alternative view. Hertz was involved in a group called the Ambidextral Culture Society, and argued that restraining lefthanders actually made their situation worse.

'Herz argued that ... if we could liberate everyone to use both their left and right hands for everything then the population would be smarter,' Kushner says.

A high profile member of the society was the founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Robert Baden-Powell—which explains why the Scout handshake that accompanies the three-fingered salute is traditionally left-handed.

'[Baden-Powell] wrote the introduction to a famous book on the need for ambidextrality,' Kushner says. 'Powell said you should shake hands with your left hand to train your left hand to be like your right hand ... which among the rest of us was seen as an improper thing to do.'

Not all institutions were as friendly to the left-handed as the Scouts were. As late as the 1940s, the head psychiatrist at the New York City board of education, Abram Blau, believed left-handedness was a symptom or manifestation of 'an attitude of opposition or negativism', and advocated forcing children into using their right hands instead. But this practice wasn't without consequences.

'We don’t see a very high rate of stutters in the United States anymore and I bet you don't in Australia. We used to,' Kushner says.

'What this group of speech pathologists decided was that the stuttering came from forcing people to use their non-dominant hand. As a result, they said, what would happen if we took these patients who were stuttering, who were forced to be right-handers, and switched them back to left-handers. Would their stuttering go away? It did.'

Some suggest that this explains the speech disorder of Prince Albert, later King George VI—the subject of the 2010 biopic The King's Speech. The young prince was switched from being a left-hander to being a right-hander at the age of seven, though he continued to play tennis with his left.

Could his stutter have been cured if he'd switched back? Kushner says his secretary wrote to some experts in Iowa who suggested they try it: 'The king's therapist said the king was too old to do this. But if they had tried it, it might have worked.'

The complex link between the hands and the brain

Kushner himself is left-handed. While his mother was forced to use her right hand to write, he was allowed to use his left. 'By the time I was growing up,' he says, 'being a left-handed baseball player was a really valuable thing.'

He first became interested in left-handedness in a scientific sense when he was studying a group of children, mostly boys, who had Tourette's syndrome, which manifests through involuntary movements, vocalisations and tics.

'I noticed that this population seemed to be much more left-handed than by chance,' he says.

'At that point I thought we should do a study to see if there's some relationship. There are other people who have actually seen relationships between left-handers and other kinds of psychiatric disorders, so the question was: were these findings really robust and was my observation a good one, or just because our sample size was so small?

'I immediately decided that I should begin to ask all our patients whether they were left-handed or not, and ask their parents.

'For the last five years, I've been looking at every sort of list from every angle, particularly the relationship that others have noticed, or claimed, between learning disabilities like attention deficit disorder, autisms, schizophrenias, Tourette's syndrome, and left-handedness.'

The question of how you count left-handedness, though, is trickier than it might first seem. In a literate society, Kushner says, we decide based on how someone writes. In pre-literate societies, it's often decided by what hand they eat with. But a lot of the links to other conditions only make sense if you consider handedness a proxy for knowing which side of the brain is dominant.

'If you're left-handed, it means your dominant brain for language should be on your right side, and when you're right-handed, your dominant brain for language should be on your left side,' Kushner says.

'Unfortunately, only 14 to 18 per cent of left-handers actually have language in their right brain. Most left-handers are just like most right-handers, their language is in their left brain. And about 5 per cent of right-handers have language in their right brain, which shouldn't happen.

'The question is: to what extent are people who have language on the non-dominant side of the brain different to people who have language on the dominant side of the brain? That's a little harder to tease out.'

A special kind of creativity?

Neuroscientific theories about brain dominance reached the popular mainstream in the 1980s when Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards became a bestseller. It encouraged artists to 'unlock the power of the right brain' in order to see the world differently—and made being a lefty more fashionable and desirable.

Kushner says many people argue that left-handers do have a special kind of creativity, but some left-handers do better than others.

'The data shows that left-handers do very well in certain kinds of testing, but other left-handers don't do so well. So you have a U-curve, where on one hand you have really smart people, and on the other you have people with probable learning disabilities.

'The question is: what makes the difference? Does all left-handedness come from the same forces or are they different?'

Kushner says that despite the attention that left-handedness has received, almost every question about its origin, extent, function and consequences remains unanswered. It's still hard to pin down how much left-handedness is inherited and how much is a learned behaviour.

'When we don't understand a disorder we're always looking for "the cause". But syndromes like multiple sclerosis or Tourette's syndrome are collections of signs and symptoms ... we can get those signs and symptoms in a variety of ways. They don't just have to come from one cause, not necessarily just one gene.'

For Kushner, it's important to remember is that being left-handed isn't negative on its own terms.

'The greatest harm to being left-handed is not being left-handed, but the way people treat left-handers,' he says. 'The deficits come not from being left-handed, but from being treated as if there is a deficit.'

Listen to the full interview Howard Kushner speaks with fellow lefty Phillip Adams on Late Night Live.

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