Are left-handed people more gifted than others?

Before we get into the main part, did you know Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed. So were Mozart,Diego Armando Maradona, James A. Garfield, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton,Mark Twain, Marie Curie, Nicola Tesla and Aristotle?. It’s no different today – former US president Barack Obama is a left-hander, and last but not least, an American business magnate Bill Gates.

Approximately 10% and 13.5% of the population are left handers and a few of these people are equally comfortable using either hand, right or left.

Hand preference is a manifestation of brain function and is related to cognition. Left-handers exhibit, on average, a more developed right brain hemisphere, which is specialised for processes such as spatial reasoning and the ability to rotate mental representations of objects.

Also, the corpus callosum – the bundle of nerve cells connecting the two brain hemispheres tends to be larger in left-handers. This shows that some left-handers have an enhanced connectivity between the two hemispheres and so they have a superior information processing. Why that is, however, is unclear. One theory argues that living in a world designed for right-handers could be forcing left-handers to use both hands – thereby increasing connectivity. This opens up the possibility that we could all achieve enhanced connectivity by training ourselves to use both hands. I personally plan to train my kids in the future to use both hands equally :)

These peculiarities may be the reason why left-handers seem to have an edge in several professions and arts. For example, they are over-represented among musicians, creative artists, architects and chess players.