Ideas - The History and Mystery of Left-Handers

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

They've remained a minority among humans since the dawn of our species, coping with systems and tools arranged for right-handers, and sometimes thriving as a result of their difference. IDEAS explores the history — and latest mysteries — of the 'sinister 10 per cent' to find out what makes a left-hander special. *This episode originally aired on May 2, 2022.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

All through history, there have been prejudice against left-handers. This is Southpaw. I don't want you messing around with Southpaws. They do everything back. Southpaw nothing. I've dropped them in three. Roughly one out of every nine people is left-handed. Anthropologists say it's been that way for all of human history. There's been this tremendous tradition of myths about left-handedness. They are rare and different, but they are always present.

Members of this mysterious minority, the Latin for left is sinister after all, have put up with insults. What I was doing was wrong. What I was doing looked clumsy and awkward. And suspicion. The left hand was reserved for something more sinister. And even envy. You left me dangling, Lemon. I'm not a creative type like you with your work sneakers and your left-handedness. I can't do what you do. I can't do what you do.

Growing up as an otherwise unremarkable child in Ottawa, I always harbored secret pride about my left-handedness. On today's program, contributor Mark Dance looks into the truths, lies, and latest speculations about left-handers like himself. It was like a covert power I shared with Jimi Hendrix. And Paul McCartney. And David Boat. And did you know, five of the last nine American presidents belong to my club.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. It has been the honor of my life to serve you. As for Canadian prime ministers, there's Joe Clark. We naturally accept that result and accept the defeat that our party received at the polls tonight. And that's about it. So, okay, Canada doesn't help make the case that left-handers are especially well-suited for leadership. However, all left-handers do share one quality in common.

We're all an evolutionary puzzle. Evolutionary puzzle. The question is, why hasn't natural selection weeded left-handers out over time? This is Thomas Richardson. He's been investigating why left-handedness exists. I'm a PhD student at the University of Manchester in the UK. I study the evolutionary biology of human behavior. Left-handers have always been present.

There are no recorded societies where there are no left-handers have always been present. There are no recorded societies where there are no left-handers, but there are also no societies where left-handers are the majority. They are a persistent minority. Generally, when two phenotypes coexist in a population, one of them will eventually drive the other to extinction. One will have a slight advantage over the other, and over time, that one will win out. So the fact that left and right handers are present in all human populations suggests that there is some sort of balancing act going on, or perhaps some other factors at play. Thomas Richardson is interested in what's called the fighting hypothesis of evolution. See, I tell you what the true evolution is, I'm a southpaw.

What's a southpaw? A southpaw means you're left handed and a southpaw throws your timing off. The fighting hypothesis comes from this observation that many professional fighters tend to be left handed, more so than you would expect by chance. And the observation that many warriors in ancient texts also seem to be disproportionately left-handed. Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade and his bowels discharged.

And so the theory is that left-handedness provides an advantage in combat. A strange breed of swordsmen once fought the English here. It's said they always won because many were left-handed. Many were left-handed. Picture two ancestral males squaring up to fight for whatever reason. This might be on the battlefield or this might be within a tribe to settle a score. Now, the right-handed male will have trained fighting against other right-handed males mostly because most people are right-handed male will have trained fighting against other right-handed males mostly because most most people are right-handed and so he will have plenty of experience fighting other right-handed

males on the other hand the left-handed male will also have plenty of experience fighting right-handed males because again most of the population are right-handed and so this gives the left-handed male a surprise advantage he is he's trained to fight his opponent but his opponent hasn't got the experience with people like him in the heat of a fight any split-second advantage can be the deciding factor it can mean the difference between life and death or being knocked out. You yourself are a left-handed boxer. Can you give me any concrete examples, whether from your own life or just a scenario, where your handedness, the handedness of a left-hander, would be an advantage?

Yeah, so often I will box in a left-handed stance, meaning that my right leg is forward instead of my left leg. My left hand is in the rear, as they say. This means that not only are my punches coming from different directions, but it also means that because the whole way I stand is different, it means that all of the footwork involved in a fight is different. It means that the movements are different. Most notably, my jabbing hand, which in this case would be my right hand, is on the same side as my opponent's jabbing hand. We both have our hands out in front of us, almost touching. And so there are many tactics that left-handers can use against right-handed opponents.

Right-handers can use them against left-handers as well, against right-handed opponents. Right-handers can use them against left-handers as well, but they will typically practice them less because most of their opponents will be right-handed, so they won't have the chance. And when you do spar, do you tend to give the other person some notice that you're a lefty,

or are you known as a lefty at your gym, or do they adjust as they realize that you're a lefty? How does that interaction normally go? I won't often tell them, but they, because we all spar with each other quite often, they do know in advance. And when I spar with somebody new, they will realize within a few seconds that I'm left-handed. And some of them adjust, some of them panic. Some of them adjust, some of them panic, and particularly more inexperienced fighters, a lot of their plans and tactics seem to go out the window.

You can see it in their face that they're expecting one thing and they got something else. And that's quite good for me. In an evolutionary context, if left-handers have this surprise advantage, it means that they are more likely to win fights. And in our ancestral environment, winning fights will have meant winning status, accumulating more resources. And status and resources were important for ancestral males because they are very attractive to ancestral females. Even today, women tend to be more attracted to men who have power, status, money, and so on and so forth. Not necessarily to men who are good at fighting though. And this might solve our evolutionary

conundrum because notice that the advantage of left-handers is not innate, it is context dependent. Left-handers only have the advantage because they are rare. If left-handers were equally common as right-handers, left-handers would cease to have this surprise advantage. And this explains why left-handers are maintained in the population at a low level. If they were to win more fights, get more resources, they would presumably have more children, and those children would be left-handed. And so the proportion of left-handers in the population will increase. But if it gets too high, the left-handers start to lose their advantage. And this causes them to drop back down in the population because they will still have many of the disadvantages of

being left-handed, such as the increased prevalence of mental and physical health disorders. You mentioned that their children will be left-handed. Do we know that for sure? How strongly correlated to heredity is left-handedness? The genetic component is small to moderate, I would say. It is about as strong as the genetic influences on your personality. If your parents are left-handed, you yourself are more likely to be left-handed yourself. It's by no means certain. more likely to be left-handed yourself, it's by no means certain.

It's very likely that combat is just one factor that plays a role in why we have left-handed people today. Most notably because the genetic component of left-handedness is not particularly large, this means that evolution and natural selection can't act on it as strongly as it could if it had a large genetic component. Other factors are at play. When I was a kid I had fanciful notions about my left-handedness. But they weren't so much about winning fistfights. I liked the idea that it made me more creative.

And maybe smarter? There's a sort of notion that somehow left-handers are more creative. To the point that some people who are creative are said to be left-handed when they're not. Michael Corbalis, cognitive psychologist and author of The Lopsided Ape and The Truth About Language. I think Picasso, the sort of idea that he was left-handed, there's an idea that Einstein was left-handed, but neither of these things are true. There's a nice story, I don't know whether you know it, about James Michener, the writer, who was voted the left-hander of the year a few years ago. Turns out, he says,

the only thing he does with his left hand is scratch his right elbow. So I think there is a sort of almost a reaction against the negative image that left-handers have to somehow declare them to be more creative or more fun or somehow better. Is there any basis for the perception that left-handers are more creative than righties? Not really. I mean, there are people who've tried to test creativity in different handedness groups, but the results are never convincing.

I don't think they're less creative. If they are more creative, it may be sometimes because they are the minority, and minorities often need to express themselves. So you can never tease out whether it's that kind of reaction or whether it's in fact genetic. So are there any true advantages to being left-handed in your estimation? Well, I used to live in Canada and there was a time when one of the hockey teams, I think it might have been the Montreal Canadiens, were all taught to hit the, what is, you hit a puck, that you hit it left-handed.

And that's to sort of mess up the opposition. And so things like left-handed tennis players, left-handed boxers and so forth often seem to have an advantage because they're different. So sometimes it's an advantage in competitive situations simply to be different. competitive situation simply to be different. This was not exactly the mark of distinction I was hoping for. A difference only notable for being a difference? I haven't seen very much evidence that left-handed people on average are more creative or artistic than right-handers.

Thomas Richardson agrees with Michael Corbalis. There is good data to suggest that the average IQ of left-handers and right-handers are approximately equal. There is also quite a bit of evidence that left-handers are overrepresented among people with mental health difficulties and other cognitive defects. I've been avoiding this particular detail, but Thomas Richardson keeps bringing it up. Because they will still have many of the disadvantages of being left-handed, increased prevalence of mental and physical health disorders. of being left-handed increase prevalence of mental and physical health disorders.

The left has long been thought abnormal. 10% of them reported that they had some kind of immune disease. There is something strange about the left hand. Many disorders can be, quote, connected to left-handedness. Take schizophrenia. One famous study appeared to show 40% of schizophrenia sufferers are left-handed. That's massive. But the claim is controversial.

Other studies show no such correlation. And no one's claiming left-handedness causes schizophrenia, or vice versa. Never let your right hand know what your left hand's doing is an old saw that doesn't register with 63-year-old Ralph Slater, for Ralph can write with both hands. As you see, he can not only write with both hands, but he can use them simultaneously. In 2018, British scientists added up all the important studies done so far. They concluded a person with schizophrenia is about one and a half times as likely to be ambidextrous, or slightly left-handed. As long as he can remember,

Rolfe has been able to bring to bear on double writing that singular concentration the art requires. If pushed, he can probably write different letters to two different people at once. Ambidextrous, we should say so. But if you're strongly left-handed, there's no clear link to schizophrenia. If that sounds muddy, how about this Bulgarian study from April 2022? It went looking for signs that schizophrenia is harder to treat in people whose left side dominates. They didn't find

anything for left-handers or left-footers. However, they did prove it's much harder to help patients who show a preference for looking through a small hole using their left eyeball. So left and right-handers might have different brains. Everything that anybody ever studied was about what was wrong with left handers. This is known as the left hand path. Here you will live a life of danger, creativity, perhaps not a respected life. The decades of research into what's wrong with left-handers may be well-meant. Some of it might even be useful. But it brings up a sensitive issue, an ancient stigma. The right-handed majority telling us we're not blessed, that we're

cursed. A lot of this, of course, is ultimately fed by this competition between the sacred and the profane, and left-handedness and left-handed things have been seen as profane, whereas right-handed has been seen more as holy. Yeah, this is Howard Kushner. I'm a retired professor of public health, neuroscience, and behavioral biology at Emory University. I'm also an emeritus professor at University of California, San Diego. I'm happy to talk about my latest book, On the Other Hand, Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History. On the other hand, left hand, right brain, mental disorder, and history. So in a world where you can't explain difference,

where you can't explain why things happen, using the notion of left-handedness as a way to account for evil, and it cuts all the way through our society historically, as far back as the Bible, probably before that even in China. You write that both you and your mother were natural left-handers. Can you paint a picture of how different your Southpaw experiences were as children? Yeah, well, my mother was forced to switch. And so she spent her life using her right hand in the tasks that they assumed she should, writing, eating, things like that. But she was a left-hander. And as a result, it affected her coordination, the inability to use her left hand for things. And when she went to school, she was born in 1919. And when she went to

grammar school in high school, the resistance to letting her use her left hand was severe and I'm sure had many impacts on her. When I grew up, having been born 30 years later, being left-handed, especially for a young boy who played baseball, was a positive thing and no one ever tried to switch me. You mentioned that your mom had some impacts from being forced to switch. Do you have any sense for what those impacts were? Well, they weren't necessarily cognitive, but she was a little slower in terms of motor functions. She had difficulty. She couldn't use scissors. Women were supposed to learn, girls were supposed to learn how to use scissors and do sewing. She had a lot of trouble with that because

she was doing it with the hand that they forced her to do it with was her right hand and she was wanting to do it left-handed. I think it affected her coordination too in other ways. And it didn't occur to me until later in life when I began to think more about left-handedness that I could see this connection for her. What lessons have stuck with you from that experience of being a left-hander as a child and seeing your mom struggle with being forced to switch? I didn't think about it that much when I was growing up since it seemed natural to be a left-hander. My heroes were first basemen who were left-handed and I was a tennis player. But when I started to work in the clinic on Tourette's syndrome in the mid-1990s, I noticed that it seemed to me that more of our patients with Tourette's syndrome and attention deficit disorder

seemed to be left-handed. So I wondered if there was some sort of relationship between these disorders and handedness. And that launched me on my eventual research and examination of the effects and causes of left-handedness. Howard Kushner makes the point that these effects include some that are indirect. They're a consequence of social attitudes towards left-handedness, not its biology. If you go through human history, you'll see the systematic attempt to switch people from their left hand to their right hand. So either characterize them as evil or force them to try to use their other hand. But the consequences of using the other hand, using their right hand, were much greater and negative than the problem of

being left-handed in the first place. So for instance, I think probably everyone who's listening to this program probably saw the King's speech. I'm not here to discuss personal matters. Why are you here then? Because I bloody well stammer! And the king was forcibly switched, after he was seven or eight years old, from writing and eating with his left hand. And then he developed, as a result, a stutter.

It'll be like Mad King George the Third. Mad King George the Stammerer. In fact, it was a very common thing in the United States and Britain and on the continent to force switch left-handers into right-handers by all kinds of different mechanisms. One is by tying the left hand and arm behind their back, by severely punishing them for using their left hand for eating and for writing in school. And as a result, stuttering seems to be associated with left-handedness. And curiously, in the 1930s and 40s in the University of Iowa, where speech pathology was first developed as an area of study, they were treating stutters, which were much more common in the early 20th century than they are today. And one of the things they decided to try was what would happen if these stutters,

almost all of whom had been switched from left-handedness to right-handedness, what would happen if they restored their left-handedness and let them use their left hand? And miraculously or unbelievably, when I first saw the data, about 100% of the people that they experimented with were switched back. From all kinds of ages, from as late as their 70s, their stutters went away. I found that hard to believe, but there were the records showing it. And so one common assumption was that forced hand switching caused stuttering, and stuttering had its own horrible consequences. Howard saw a similar pattern with people's learning abilities. Well, when you read the case studies of these patients in Iowa and other places, you can see that as a result, these kids are very slow in learning because normally you have

one side of your brain that's more lateralized, more powerful than the other side when it comes to linguistic functions. And so this interfered with and slowed down their ability to read, write, even to be coordinated in the classroom, which was exacerbated by the fact that the teachers that taught them and the society in which they lived saw left-handedness itself as an illness. Kids were literally put in the corner and called dunces for using their left hand. I have many, many interviews with people who are left-handed

and switched to be right-handed as late as the 1960s in France and the United States and Britain. And according to them, it affected every part of their life. First of all, they didn't do as well in school. The argument was left-handers weren't smart, but they didn't do as well in school because they were excluded from regular schooling. The desks and everything about the society was open to right-handers. So left-handers were seen, depending on where you were in the world, as evil, as dangerous, as sinful, and as willful.

So the idea was to tame them with their left-handedness, but it was impossible in many cases. But where they were switched, not only was the damage from the humiliation, but also there was the damage to their cognitive skills, which seemed to be erased relatively simply by switching them back to their dominant hand.

Any language in the world that you can come up with, the word for left is a negative, like sinestra in Italian and in Latin, lift, broken in German. Every description that you can't come up with, a word that's used to substitute for left that isn't discriminatory in German. Every description that you can't come up with a word that's used to substitute for left that isn't discriminatory in itself. Chinese, it means you've taken the wrong trail. And so it's quite interesting that left-handedness is already built in, even discussing what it is,

and to a negative connotation itself. And there's a list of things that you could make beyond the one I've just given you. So here we go. Scrammy-handed, corry-fisted, skiffle-handed, cow-pored, keggy-handed, skir-handed, scuddy-whifter, scuddy-whifter, dolly-pored, clicky, southpored, spuddy-handed, golly-handed, keggy-handed, kidder-keg, left-kelly, cluck, gar-pored, cack-fisted. Thatuddy-handed. Golly-handed. Caggy. And kiddo. Cag. Left Kelly. Cluck. Garpawed. Cack fist. That was really well done for a bunch of nonsense.

You said that really eloquently. There's a couple more you don't know about. One of them is care-handed. K-E-R. Buck-fisted. Carry-handed. Southpaw. Scrammy.

Caggy. Katie. Quickie. Southpaw's Grammy. Katie. Clicky. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear Ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401,

check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Left-handers. Occasionally revered, but more often reviled. In the early 20th century, an Italian criminologist wrote that, quote, left-handed people are more numerous among criminals and sensitive left-sided people among lunatics. On today's episode, Southpaw contributor Mark Dance comes to grips with left-handedness, its origins, its opportunities, and the persistent problems it can present for both the lefties themselves and the right-handed majority. Okay, I just wanted to ask, Mark, do you want me to mention that I am left-handed

in my introduction? That's not required, right? Sure, you could. That's a great idea, Kabakshi. You tack that on the end of your introduction to yourself. This is Dr. Sri Kamakshi Kodandaraman. I'm from Chennai, India. I'm an ENT surgeon slash head and neck surgical oncologist. And more relevantly today, I am left-handed.

In the Indian culture at large, the right hand is considered to be the more pure hand and the left hand is considered to be the impure hand. It is sort of set that you eat with your right hand and you wash yourself with your with your left hand so so when a child is born and he or she shows a natural inclination to eat or you know hold things with the left hand it is a sort of a cultural shock for the parents and for everybody around them it is as though this this child is doing something which is against the laws of nature. So they try to change you that you know this is wrong, this hand is not what you use this for. It is your right hand that you use for eating and left hand for doing all dirty things. So that is how it is looked at in the society it is slowly changing but even to this day like take some religious

activities like you light candles in the church we light diyas you know small lamps in the temples so even to this day i mean i would naturally light the matchstick or the lighter with my left hand and take it towards the diya and somebody, either my grandmother or my mother, somebody, they would hit my hand and say, use your right hand. So what do I do? I use both hands. I cannot, you know, just handle fire with my right hand. It's not safe for me and safe for others. So I use both my hands. So even to this day, there is this cultural stigma about the left hand being impure and the right hand being pure. Howard Kushner talked earlier about that cultural stigma and how it can affect left-handers when they're growing up. Not only was it damaged from the humiliation, but also there was the damage to their cognitive skills.

Luckily for Dr. Kathandaraman, when she was a kid, she met a wise doctor. When I was around five years old, I was introduced to classical music. It's called Carnatic music in India. Part of this learning this particular form of music, you are supposed to keep up your own beats. It's called talam, which you do with, I mean, with your own hand. So even this I was naturally doing it with my left hand. So my music teacher and my mother and everybody else forcibly made me to start doing that with my right hand. The only saving grace was when my teacher and my parents realized that I was left-handed and they consulted my pediatrician. She has told them that please don't do anything, please don't try to convert her, if the child

will get confused. Which is a very true statement because I know people personally surgeons I mean I more of surgeons who were originally who were born left-handed but who were forcibly converted to become a right-handed person as in they write with their right hand and all that I have noticed that they are they are somewhat more confused than the original left-handed person and a right-handed person confused in the sense they take they keep second-guessing their own decisions, you know, whether it's about a patient, whether it's about themselves. So already the confusion in this world is quite large for a left-handed person. But when you try

to convert that person into a right-handed person, that too at that very young age, during those formative years, I think it really leaves an impression on that young mind. When Kamakshi began her training as a surgeon, she ran into a big obstacle, hospital equipment. In any ENT clinic, there is something called a bullseye lamp. Bullseye lamps are an age-old instrument in ENT, where there is a light source which is placed above the left shoulder of the patient and the ENT surgeon or the doctor wears a head mirror on his around his head and he uses that mirror to focus the light which comes from the bullseye lamp into the patient's ear, nose or throat I mean which are the three parts which need to be examined in an ENT outpatient department.

And this bullseye lamp is generally placed above the left shoulder of the patient. This is because assuming the majority of the ENT doctors are right-handed people and what happened was when I went and sat in that same ENT cubicle to examine my patients on during my initial few days I noticed that I could never you know focus the light into the patient's ear nose or throat exactly when I needed to focus it I would focus it and it would seem as though I can see everything clearly but when I put my glove my gloved hand or an instrument into the patient's ear nose or throat I would notice that right at that point there would be a shadow. I would suddenly not be able to see what I needed to see.

It took me a while to realize that this shadow was because my very own right hand was blocking the light from reaching the mirror and getting reflected into the patient's body part. Then I realized that what needed to be done was for a left-handed surgeon the same bull's eye lamp will serve its purpose only if it is placed above the right shoulder of the patient. So this was the first realization. The college is like several decades old so all those instruments all those bull's eye lamp is sort of drilled into the ground you cannot move the bull's eye lamps. The second hurdle was when I stepped into the endoscopy room for training. So endoscopy is one of the basic investigations which need to be done for an ENT patient because you need to have a look inside the

into the depths of the ear and nose and into the depths of the throat. So endoscopy is something you need to learn. The first few days you are allowed to watch your seniors do the procedures you know so that you get an idea of what is expected of you the patient would be lying down comfortably and the patient the doctor would stand on the right side of the patient and they would take the endoscope in the left hand and they would introduce it into the nose or the ear and they would look into the TV to visualize whatever the camera was showing on the inside. So I thought fine you can use your left hand, good. Seems like my left-handedness is actually going to be of some benefit now. When it was finally my turn, one day I went to the endoscopy room. There was my first patient lying there. I had introduced myself, made sure that he was comfortable.

Then after that I introduced the endoscope. It was such a joyous feeling at the outset because it was very easy to introduce the endoscope with my left hand. I was able to maneuver it quite easily and get the job done as long as the job was only seeing something inside. Now most of the time endoscopy doesn't stop with just visualizing. You will need to you know pick up an instrument to to touch whatever abnormal structure whether it is a foreign body in the case of a little child or whether it is a polyp or you know anything any abnormal structure inside the nose you will need to touch it so for all this you need to use your other hand to

use your instruments and maneuver inside the nasal cavity so now that my endoscope was in my left hand I had to use my right hand to do all this it's a very small space the nose and the ear they're all very small spaces so your movements need to be extremely delicate so I was obviously clumsy with my right hand and that is when I realized that I would end up hurting the patient if I continue doing this. So in an article that you wrote you quote benjamin franklin who said if by chance i touched a pencil a pen or a needle i was bitterly rebuked and more than once i have been beaten for being awkward and wanting a graceful manner end quote and then you say in your article, his words reflect the exact state of

affairs and the state of mind of the lonely left-hander in this right-dominated world, end quote. Can you tell me about what you mean by that? These were exactly my thoughts while I was standing in the operating room. I couldn't understand what was happening. Nobody could understand how to teach me. It would all like come out, it would be expressed as though that what I was doing was wrong, what I was doing looked clumsy and awkward and weird. Okay so it was it was always about how they perceived me, how they perceived what I was doing. It was never about how it must be in my shoes because nobody had had experience with training a left-handed ENT surgeon until then.

So these were exactly the thoughts in my mind. I mean, I probably should not even touch a scalpel. I should not touch an endoscope because I'm going to be awkward. I'm going to be clumsy. I mean, I'm going to be bad at it. So I should save myself and the patient, the trauma and drop these things and probably, you know, move to a different subspecialty, which doesn't demand this level of skill. Those words reflect the exact state of my mind during those few months when nobody could understand and nobody could help me and it sort of pushed me into a corner and finally

out of the operating room itself. The scissor, the common scissor that you get in the regular stores and all that, if you look at the orientation of the blades, it is such that it will cut better when it is cut with a cut by a right-handed person as against by a left-handed person I have had this issue in the operating room too so I will be the assistant surgeon the assistant surgeon is the one who who does these small small things cut here put a clip there do this do that mop here mop there you know so when I So when I am told to cut the thread after the suture has been put, it won't cut. It just won't cut. So I'll turn to the nurse and tell her, the scissor is not working, just give me a different scissor. So the first

time he or she will give me a different scissor, I will cut, it won't cut again. So then the primary surgeon will lose his or her patience, grab the scissor from me and cut, it will cut. It was extremely humiliating, like you can't operate a basic scissor. Then I would tell them, no sir, it is blunt. Yeah right, it's blunt for you, it's not blunt for me, how does that work? So it was only then I realized that the orientation of the blades itself was such that it cuts better by a right-handed person, as in the blades move towards each other and they cut. But when a left-handed person cuts it, the blades actually move away from each other right at the point when it needs to cut. That is when I came to know that there is something called left-handed scissors in this

world too, where the orientation of the blades is the exact opposite and so it cuts better by a left-handed person. The majority of the world population is the exact opposite. And so it cuts better by a left-handed person. The majority of the world population is right-handed. So it makes sense that everything is aligned to them. But for everything to be at a disadvantage for the left-handed person is what is the problem here. We need to have options for the left-handed person so that he or she also feels comfortable even with these most basic of activities. Left-handers are cursed with extra obstacles in a right-handed world, but the curse can be a blessing too. Persevering has its own benefits.

Left-handedness will start out as a disadvantage, but it is possible to convert it into an advantage for yourself. When I started operating with my left hand my seniors got confused they didn't understand what I was doing and they tried to keep correcting me they said you're holding it in the wrong hand change your hand change your hand initially I mean I would oblige I would actually try doing what they would say but it would only make things worse I would I would like start dropping the instruments you know there was no control over what was happening. So it reached a point where they lost their patience with me and I lost my confidence.

And this kept continuing until I stopped going to the operation theatre altogether. This was suddenly noticed by my head of the department. Probably, you know, news must have reached him that there is one resident who never steps into the operation theatre. So he called me one day to his office and asked me what's going on i just said some some vague response something i mean like non-committal because by the time my confidence had taken such a beating that i wasn't sure about myself i wasn't sure about whether what i was thinking is right or not and i just said something and I excused myself and left but then I realized that since somebody is actually asking me about it let me just take the chance and see whether it can be

corrected before I take the decision of quitting the course altogether so I called him up that night and I told him sir I am a left-handed person and there seems to be a serious problem about it. Either I am not able to operate or they are not able to understand what is happening. So that is the issue. So he said, okay, I mean, I understand there's a problem, but you will need to tell me how, how exactly do I help you? Can you write it up or something, you know, I mean, because I guess I was quite emotionally drained by then and I was not able to communicate exactly what needed to be communicated. So what I did I wrote down all this I wrote down all that and I took some international books to show him there were actually pictures

which showed that for left-handed surgeon the anesthetic stands here the surgeon stands here the boy's apparatus is kept here and then I wrote all this so he said okay now I finally understand so he decided to take me personally under his mentorship and he started telling the anesthetist and the staff knows about how to set the operation data for me there was a lot of resistance initially because you know everything is I mean they are already comfortable in a particular way and for me to come there and tell them to do everything differently like you know put the tube the anesthesia tube on the right side so normally the tube is put on the left side

this is for both the comfort of the anesthetist and the surgeon now i'm telling them to do everything in reverse so there was a lot of resistance initially but after some time it started becoming a habit if they saw my name against a particular surgery, they would make this arrangement automatically. And I finally ended up learning endoscopic sinus surgery and other ENT surgeries. Dr. Srikamakshi Kathandaraman is a surgeon in Chennai, India. surgeon in Chennai, India. Institutions, equipment, things like that are designed for right-handers. Thomas Richardson, the evolutionary biologist we heard earlier. And this means that left-handers who want to succeed in these fields are forced to get a bit creative in order to succeed or in order to achieve the same level as their right-handed peers. So for example to play guitar left-handed you have to

restring the guitar the opposite way. It is more difficult to learn from for example YouTube videos or even from a teacher who is likely to be right-handed. And so what happens is that it might be that the left-handers who stick with their craft, be it art or music, for long enough in the face of this adversity are also more likely to go on to greatness because these are the kind of people who can really persevere and who can creatively solve problems and tackle the kind of barriers to to becoming great at something so adding to the fighting hypothesis, now we have a fighting-the-system hypothesis.

A portion of left-handers survive and even thrive because of extra pressures on them. Not that this makes stigma a good thing. Kamakshi's story is partly about triumph over adversity, but it's also about accommodation and the value of a sympathetic mentor who is ready to change some of the rules. Left-handedness can serve as an example of what happens when an old stigma against a minority starts to fade away. I asked Howard Kushner about this. Over the last couple centuries, countries like Australia, New Zealand, and the United States

have seen big changes in the prevalence of left-handedness. How dramatic have the shifts been, and what accounts for the change in behavior in those countries? Well, I mean, there are two things here. One is the number of people considered left-handed has increased in all these areas, while at the same time discrimination against it has declined so why has there been an increase well there's an increase because there's no discrimination anymore about being left-handed whatever advantages there may also be so not only has left-handedness increased but stuttering has decreased right and so as a result, being left-handed is seen as a positive thing.

There can be more reported. Think about it this way, which is in a traditional society, the selection of a mate may depend on a variety of things, but certainly no one in a traditional society like the Zulu would knowingly want to marry someone who is left-handed or have children with them. The result is that people would hide their left-handed or have children with them. The result is that people would hide their left-handedness. And some people might just be able to be switched more easily than others. So as a result, the increase in left-handedness is actually tied to a decrease in discrimination against left-handers. But where the discrimination is strong, the number of left-handers is low.

So in China, for instance, the number of left-handers is low. So in China, for instance, the number of left-handers reported is very low, in part because it doesn't suit the transformation of China from a traditional society to a more industrial one, where they want everyone to do things pretty much the same way. And so it becomes expensive and cost intense to allow 10% of the population to be left-handed. If you discriminate against left-handers, then they don't seem to do as well in school and education because, of course, they've been discriminated against. In a way, left-handedness is a route to get to understanding disability studies, this new influence we have in recognizing that disabilities are not necessarily something that is characterological, but rather something that is a result of motor and other functions. And once we do that, we can see the openness to diversity. But in a way,

anti-left-handedness is a kind of attack on diversity, looking in a society for everyone to do things the same way from the same place. And I think that's what's been challenged in the last 100 years. One thing you can say for sure, which is the more discrimination, the lower the number of left-handers. The more the society is open to diversity, the more number of left-handers will be out there and admitted. So is it fair to say that toleration of left-handers can be a kind of barometer for wider cultural

toleration in a society? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's true. The West is a really good example of that place, right? And it's tied to several things. But one thing is that society can afford more diversity and it finds advantages for more diversity. So when it comes to issues of race, issues of gender, issues of sex, when those things are much more widely seen and not discriminated against ipso facto,

most likely that's a society which will have much more openness to left handedness. Most likely that's a society which will have much more openness to left-handedness. There is no link between being left-handed and immoral behaviour. Left-handers are quite harmless to a cultural society. There isn't really a reason to persecute them other than that they are different and so you can imagine that how a society treats left-handers is is a good proxy of how they treat different people in general and it also has the advantage that left-handers are found everywhere so you can quite easily compare societies on how they treat left-handers because you know that every society will have left-handers. We are also made to be adaptable.

I asked Michael Corbulis what he considers the most important lesson from his decades of research into handedness, language, and the brain. I guess what surprised me most is how complicated it is. I mean, some years ago, I wrote a book called The Lopsided Eight, which argued that asymmetry was something that was unique to humans and defined humans. And that seemed logical at the time, because language is something that seems to be unique to humans, and that's in the left brain. And at the time, I thought that handedness probably was also unique to humans,

and I put them together and called us The Lopsided Eight. since then, of course, once you make a statement like that, people come up with all the exceptions. And since then, it's emerged that quite a lot of other species have handedness. Chimpanzees, in fact, great apes seem to prefer the right hand. Kangaroos, amazingly, are left-handed. Parrots are left-footed when they pick up things. So handedness is there all over the place, actually. I think it teaches that handedness is, or that asymmetry is something that can evolve when it's advantageous. And it can override the natural bilateral symmetry that we all have and that all animals have. So by looking at how it works in other animals, we can perhaps get some insight into

how it came about in humans. One theory that I think is probably true, that there's no gene or no sort of left-handedness per se. Left-handedness probably comes about through the absence of right-handedness. So you're either right-handed or you're not. And if you're not, it's a matter of chance. So then the sort of environment will push you one way or the other. So there's probably about 25% of people have no right-handedness genetically, and half of those approximately turn out to be left-handed, and half of them turn out to be right-handed, although a small proportion are probably ambidextrous. So the thinking about handedness is it's not so much about right versus left-handed, it's more about right-handed versus the absence of right-handedness. Difficult concept to grasp, I think, but that's the way things are going.

So there it is. It seems to be there in the majority of people from birth. But there are also, of course, environmental things that may influence it, cultural things. You can certainly build up a lot of skill with the left hand, even if you're right-handed. I think piano playing is an example of that. So you can certainly train your hands up. We are plastic creatures so that we can learn to do all sorts of things with our hands that can override what we're born with. Left-handedness can be irritating,

mostly for us left-handers when the scissors don't work or the ink smudges. To be fair, it's also inconvenient for right-handers. They just want to set up hospital operating rooms in an efficient, uniform way. And here we are messing that up for them. But left-handedness can also be the grit that makes some pearls. A cue to make us more attentive to each other, and maybe more open to differences. When I spoke to Dr. Kathanda Raman, she was eight months pregnant. I asked her how she might respond if her newborn baby turns out to be a lefty.

You're right. That is something I have thought about. And what I need to be alert about is to see if there is somebody in the child's social circle, or initially at school itself, because that is the most important time, whether there has been somebody who has been telling him or her that what you're doing is wrong why are you using your left hand to write why are you using your left hand to pick up that chocolate so i think it will start showing in the child's behavior in some time and if i and if i think that is what i will need to be on the lookout for whether there is anybody important at least like the teacher or somebody in the immediate circle of the child who is telling

the child that what he or she is doing is wrong. I will need to give him or her the confidence that he is absolutely right, there is nothing wrong with what he or she is doing. In fact, he or she has been, I should probably tell him or her that he or she is born with a special talent with being able to use the left hand and that he should try to use both hands in life. You were listening to The Left-Handers by Ideas contributor Mark Dance, with help from Tom Howell. Thanks to all of the guests on this program.

I'm Thomas Richardson. Yeah, this is Howard Kushner. I'm Michael Corvallis. This is Dr. Srikamakshi Kodandaraman. You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, for information about their books. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.