Who is right handed

Building Trades. We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms.

Origin of right-handed Middle English word dating back to — Words nearby right-handed rightful , right gastric vein , right gastro-omental vein , right hand , right-hand buoy , right-handed , right-hander , right-hand man , right-hand rule , right heart , right hepatic duct. Words related to right-handed clockwise , dexter , dextral. How to use right-handed in a sentence I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

A common myth about lefties propagated in part by right-handed siblings is that they die about ten years earlier. It originated with a survey that asked family members whether deceased relatives in California had been left or right-handers, and it found that people who died younger were more likely to be left-handed. But the study was flawed, because there were simply fewer very old people who were left-handed.

During this time, people were forcibly made right handed in schools where everyone learned to write with their right hand, and to accommodate factory work where machines were set up for right handers only. Handedness is a manifestation of brain lateralization—one side of the brain or the other being responsible for a certain cognitive function.

Lateralization was discovered in when French physician Pierre Paul Broca noticed that patients with lesions on the left side of their brains had language deficits. Sign up for our email newsletter. Already a subscriber? Sign in.

Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. She replies: In the years in which "handedness" has been studied we have learned quite a lot, but we still cannot precisely describe what causes humans preferentially to use one hand over the other, or why human populations are biased toward right-hand use rather than left-hand use.

Get smart. Sign Up. Wear on the preserved teeth of Homo heidelbergensis , for instance, suggest that food was usually brought to the mouth with the right hand. This tells us when that shift occurred, but not why. Some have argued that it all comes down to language. Indeed, this left-brained specialisation for language is even more common than right-handedness — which might suggest that as the left hemisphere evolved for language, the preference for the right hand may have intensified simply as a side effect.

This is called the Homo loquens hypothesis: lateralisation in general was driven by the evolution of an upright, bipedal stance, while the rightward preference was driven, some time later, by the evolution of language. Right-handedness, then, may simply be an accidental by-product of the way most of our brains are wired up.

But proving the hypothesis is difficult, or even impossible, since it would ideally involve running neurological tests on our long-dead ancestors. The truth is we'll probably never quite know what the sequence of events was that led our species to lean so overwhelmingly on the right sides of our bodies and the left sides of our brains.

As for the left-handers out there?