About ten percent of the global population is left-handed, but I see a higher percentage of lefties among my students.
We still don’t know what causes left-handedness, but lefties are more likely to be ambidextrous than righties. I’ve known lefties who can do mirror-writing (including myself). This makes me think that the lefty brain is processing things slightly differently than do right-handed people.
As a lefty, I’ve always been interested in left handedness and creativity. Is there a correlation or is that a myth? Research on that question has yielded mixed results.
Brain lateralization
Brain lateralization refers to the specialization of the brain’s two hemispheres (left and right) for different functions. The left hemisphere typically dominates for language and logic, and the right for spatial and creative tasks. However, every person’s brain develops differently, and there’s a lot of overlap between the two sides of the brain. Our brain is an amazing, miraculous instrument in which the other side can take over if one side is damaged by stroke or injury.
Lefties develop less brain lateralization than righties. That means we rely less on the left hemisphere for certain tasks like language. However, that doesn’t necessarily translate to increased creativity. The problem for scientists is that creativity is a cluster of skills and propensities. That isn’t so easy to measure.
Left-handedness is, however, linked to higher incidences of serious mental illness. The prevalence of left-handedness is roughly average for mood disorders like depression and bipolar disorder, but it rises for serious forms of psychosis like schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.
If creativity is the capacity to see things differently than the ‘typical’ human brain, then perhaps left-handed creativity is linked to those debilitatingly different viewpoints.
Left handedness is also linked to higher rates of autism spectrum. That may be due to the weaker brain lateralization in left-handed people.
What do we do with our left-handed kids?
I was born with a pencil in my hand (which must have been very painful for my mother). It is possible that, as a culture, we expect our lefties to be artistic, so we train them to be artistic. To see whether this was the case, a team of researchers analyzed woodcarvers in a pre-industrial society in New Guinea. The results? There was no link between left handedness and creativity. This suggests that our western link between lefties and creativity is created by the stereotype that left-handers are more artistic.
Suppression of left-handedness
I enjoy telling people that I’m the world’s oldest living artist; someday it will actually be true. However, I learned to write and draw in the early 1960s. By that time nobody was suppressing left handedness; in fact, as a kid I didn’t know any older people who’d had their handedness suppressed. When I read that suppressing left handedness was practiced up to the late 20th century in the United States, I just laugh. Be careful what you read on the internet, kids.
The more you create, the more creative you’ll be
The human mind is too intrepid and too varied to be put in any kind of box, and that includes the box of handedness. The more you create, the more creative you’ll be. Whether you’re left- or right-handed doesn’t matter.
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Re suppression:
1. Its a big country with lots of people. I agree that suppression was largely gone by our childhood but could it have survived in ever shrinking pockets until the 1990s (or whatever date you had in your post)? Perhaps. Perhaps even today it happens, though very rarely.
2. That said, ignorance of how to teach lefties to write was common in my childhood. My parents gave my elementary school teachers a booklet each year on how to teach writing to lefties. I’ll note that probably through no fault of theirs I didn’t learn to write script until 6th grade. It took my 6th grade teacher coming in an hour early three times a week for the whole school year to work with me to pull it off. Along the way I had the delightful experience of going through various psychological testing to determine that I had mixed brain dominance (which in its mild forms is what I think you are referring to in your note).
3. For the record, in terms of visual arts I always had zero interest and zero signs of creativity.
The theory of brain dominance promoted by Roger Sperry has been completely discredited. (For those watching at home, that was the argument that one hemisphere of the brain is more dominant or active than the other in individuals, which led to Betty Edwards’ “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” etc.)
Most people have a balanced distribution of brain function between the hemispheres. The two hemispheres work together seamlessly, rather than competing with each other. Brain dominance varies depending on the task being performed, and most importantly, damage to one area of the brain results in other parts of the brain picking up the pieces and compensating. See “The Brain That Changes Itself,” by Dr. Norman Doidge, an oldie but goodie.
There are reasons other than handedness that people can’t learn to write in cursive. As exhibits A and B I give you my husband and son, both right-handed. They’re of high intelligence and dexterity. They were both forced to write in cursive in school, but I wouldn’t stake my life on their handwriting; it’s ghastly. It’s just possible that the Palmer method–long since abandoned before you or I went to school–was a better way to teach writing in cursive than the way we learned.
As for that person who had their left hand tied behind his back to force him into right-handedness, I have often wondered if it was ALWAYS an old-wives tale.
I had a year of the Palmer method in 1966, and it greatly improved my cursive.
I am right handed, but had a grandmother who was left handed and forced to write with her right hand. She was a child in Eastern Europe after 1910. It made her handwriting very shaky looking. My husband and I have a lot of left handers in our families, though we are both right handed. I never heard that left handers were supposed to be more creative until more recently. My children all have artistic talent; 2 out of 3 are left handed.