Right handed preference?

Rick

Valued Senior Member
why are most people right handed?i,mean why do they prefer right over left.?
 
I haven´t thought of that...

So give some time and will come up with a mindblowing :rolleyes:answer, because I´m ambidextrous, I use both my hands. :p
 
I've discussed this topic before but I looked at two other points.

1: For many years some people will have found that being in a Right handed world they werer forced to do right handed things. I remember having someone try to teach me to be righthanded when younger, and I know that my father suffered from being Forced to write righthandedly (he would have been lefthanded)

So society can be preportionally a reason for a persons handedness.

2: If you are other a nationality that reads texts in a different direction, I gather this would also decide the hand of an individual. (I of course have been told that there are differences too, but I mean if you read right to left and down/up, you might find writing text with your righthand would cause you to brush your arm across the text you are writing.)

This also means that writing LEFT to RIGHT and DOWN, dictates that we should write with our RIGHT to allow the words to be legible.

3: Can the earths hemispheres play a part? This is something that you would have to look at if you restructured how a person wrote (direction) as it on it's own would be unfounded.

Hope that brings some more thoughts into the topic.
 
In combat, the heart is on the left, which would be kept away from the enemy.
But I'm sure there were right handed people before there were advanced piercing weapons.

Our process of thought could have been more logical in progression, stimulating the right side of the body as the left side of the brain took up reasoning.

The North star is in the North, and is sacred through many cultures, and using that as a fixed point across the globe, the sun would rise on the right, or East, and would be associated with life, setting in the west, or left, or death.

In the womb, what organs surround the uterus, and would they cramp the left side in standard infant position?

I'm left handed, so I can't tell what benefits there are in being right handed aside from writing, in a non-determined possibility.

Hope that helps.
 
It is not that the person prefers being righthanded - although in some cultures this is forced upon them. It is that your genetic makeup makes your righthand - or your lefthand! - more adapted and more easily to write, or at least to learn how to write. Actually, it is not anything to do with the structure of your hands, it is determined by the development of your neural circuits in the cerebral cortex.
 
spankyface said:
In combat, the heart is on the left, which would be kept away from the enemy.

Except that your heart is in the centre of your chest..
 
Center of the body but the majority of the heart is slightly left of center in humans.
 
Approximately 9 out of 10 people are right-handed, a proportion that appears to have been stable over thousands of years and across all cultures in which handedness has been examined. Anthropologists have determined the incidence of handedness in ancient cultures by examining artifacts; the shape of a flint ax, for example, can indicate whether it was made by a right- or left-handed individual. Handedness in antiquity has also been assessed by examining the incidence of figures in artistic representations who are using one hand or the other. Based on this evidence, our species appears always to have been a right-handed one. Moreover, handedness is probably not peculiar to humans; many studies have demonstrated paw preference in animals ranging from mice to monkeys that is, at least in some ways, similar to human handedness.

From:

<I>Neuroscience</I> (2nd Ed.)
By Purves, Augustine, Fitzpatrick, Katz, Lamantia, Mcnamara and Williams
Sinauer Associates, Inc.
ISBN 0-87893-742-0<P>
 
Now that's a darn good analysis pointing in the right direction. According to the Wikipedia (a constantly updated online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to) "The associated left brain hemisphere is said to be more active in right-handed people, and has been found to be correlated with linguistic and logical skill.

Logical skills like using tools perhaps? So right-handedness is probably a result of practical thought arising from the left hemisphere "logical skill" side of the brain for applications useful to coping with our environment?
 
When one is ambidextrous, do they use both their hands equally, or can one just write with both hands? I'm not too sure what it all entails I think I might be ambidextous, as I can write with both hands quite clearly. But I do write more clearly with my left.
 
I was told that since the left brain controls the right side of your body (and vice versa), right handed people are left brain types.

Personally I don't believe it and there is definitely a variety of causes.
 
Maybe we should start training kids to use both hands, and measure their brainwaves later in life....
 
a friend of a friend was recently disowned by his father after going to jail for the first time. my friend said that the father said he was beyond help because the majority of people in prison are left handed, an so was his son.
 
I write with my right hand. I've always wanted to be ambidextrous though. I've tried writing with my left a few times before, but it feels incredibly awkward. I go so slow, and the result is messy, child-like writing.

Is training oneself to write well with the other hand feasible?
 
yeah, I know of people who have broken their dominant hands, and were forced to use the other, and thus got pretty good with it.
 
dead_ohio_sky said:
When one is ambidextrous, do they use both their hands equally, or can one just write with both hands? I'm not too sure what it all entails I think I might be ambidextous, as I can write with both hands quite clearly. But I do write more clearly with my left.
I bet somewhere in your "learning to write years" at least one teacher made you write with your right hand. I.e. you are a natural "leftie."

Which hand do you use if unexpectedly you must catch a ball, a knocked over glass, etc. anything automatic, but not practiced to be automatic, like brushing your teeth is?
 
It is estimated that we are all descended from one individual in northern Africa about 25,000 years ago.

He/She was right handed. There you go.

It wasn't an evolutionary preference, just an ancestral allele.
 
So-called right-handedness is merely a social construct enforcing discrimination. There needs to be more tolerance of left-handed people and affirmative action so that left-handed people are rehabilitated to represent 50% of the population.
 
Left handers are discriminated against. Think of the words 'dexter' and 'sinister'. Doesn't 'ambidextrous' mean something to the effect of 'both like the right'? Ironically, most ambidextrous people seem to be lefthanders who learned to use both to cope in a righthanded world...
 
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