Lefthanders are Ambidextrous

If you're left-handed, there's good news. Well, most utensils and tools are still almost impossible to use. But at least your handedness is no longer humiliating. Lefties used to be strange creatures, as society considered them criminals. Left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand, although it was very difficult! Now times have changed. No longer shamed or mocked, the left-handed coexist with us peacefully. 

However, doctors continue to study handedness. For example, scientists don't know why the prevalence of lefties has remained consistently at 10% of humanity over time. Or exactly how being left-handed, which relates to brain symmetry, translates into other functions of the brain.

Left-handedness has been seen as a key to the complex anatomy of the brain, so investigators continue to look for links to many other conditions, including immune disorders, learning disabilities and dyslexia, reduced life expectancy and schizophrenia. But it's not so simple.

Brain lateralization, the distribution of function into right and left hemispheres, is crucial for understanding language, thought memory and perhaps even creativity. For many years, handedness has been seen as an external clue to the balance in the brain between left and right.

For right-handed people, language activity is predominantly on the left side. Many left-handers also have left-side language dominance, but a significant number have language predominantly on the right side of the brain.

In general, left-handers have less asymmetric brains, with more perfect distribution over the two hemispheres. Perhaps a more exact way to think about them is as non-right-handers, because many of them are ambidextrous.

By Megan Gibson at www.time.com and Perri Klass at www.nytimes.com. Picture by United Press International; Gary Cameron/Reuters; Jonathan Ernst/Reuters