I'm not sure if I'm left-handed or ambidextrous -- I write with my left hand, but I use scissors and play racket sports with my right hand. I throw badly with either hand.
My father in law is like that, lefty racquet right otherwise. My daughter is same- lefty batting, hockey, and tennis but righty otherwise. Only other lefty in family was my grandmother who was fully left handed.
Canadians play left handed hockey much more frequently because they are often trained to have their dominant hand on the top of the stick for better control. I think Americans learn baseball before hockey where power is more important so dominant hand closer to the center of mass of the bat and then that carries over to holding a hockey stick.
Hockey related, this is a great story- I play occasionally with the non-pro brother, who is way better than me. His first NHL goal last week.
2: I'm the opposite -- lefty writing, and righty with a racket. It was odd with scissors - I wrote with my left hand so the teacher naturally assumed I would need left-handed scissors. But I was having a terrible time trying to cut with my left hand, and then tried regular scissors with my right hand and then I did fine.
Radiolab had a good handedness episode recently:
The punches keep coming. Jab, cross. Jab, cross. Jab, cross. Jab, cross. Hook. He doesn't bob, he doesn't weave, he doesn't dance. He's right there in front of you, you should be able to hit him, but I can't. He's just hammering me... And I go collapse in one of the chairs, and my headache is already thudding in my brain. And I say to myself." Well, that seals it. The -- the Faurie-Raymond hypothesis has to be true.
I'm ambidextrous with racquet sports because I was a good ping pong player as a kid and had to play left-handed to let others be competitive. My tennis opponents think I'm cheating when I switch hands from right to left to go after a tough backhand. (That's legal, right?)
Yes but it's illegal to hold a racquet in each hand at the same time unless you're playing lobster tennis. You could probably be nationally ranked in that.
You can't hold two racquets in one hand legally, unless you're playing castanets tennis.
In the annals of bad dads with good intentions: When my daughter was around four years old, I bought her a righthanded mitt before realizing that she was lefthanded.
She didn't want a mitt at all, but when I showed her a black one with pink highlights, she was onboard.
As a teenager, she can throw reasonably well with either hand now, so I'm not a complete failure, but she won't play catch with me and isn't interested in baseball or softball.
What about politicalbaseball or politicalsoftball? Will she play those?
Note that this is a genome-wide association study, assumption is no interaction between the variants. We really are only beginning to develop methods to recognize (not yet to search for in a hypothesis-free way) interacting variants, only the strongest cases are detectable.
As per 1, 2, 3 etc.
I'm the same. Perhaps not completely clear cut,* but I write with my right hand,** but do many other things that would normally be done with the writing hand, with my left. I throw with my left hand, catch much more readily with my left hand, and I am also very left footed in football (soccer). Box orthodox, though.
* racket sports, I suppose I am mostly right handed, but am equally bad with both sides.
* I discovered recently that I can also write reasonably well on a touch screen with my left hand, but not with a pen. So I think it's practice with the pen that's the issue, if I'm just using the end of one finger, I can write quite legibly with the left.
When horses gallop they lead with the right or left foreleg. When they are going straight it doesn't matter from a functional perspective which one but when turning they usually lead with the side that corresponds to the direction of the turn. They are more coordinated and agile when on the correct lead.
I used to ride and became curious if horses have a preferred lead when they start galloping in a straight line. It seemed to me that they do and it's usually the right side. But I was never sure if it is biased by the rider or is an inherent trait. This discussion reminded me of that question so I searched and found a study that indicates my observations were probably correct. Interestingly right side preference is about 90%, which is about what it is in humans.
https://ker.com/equinews/racehorse-lead-preferences-studied/
Hah. Literally 10 minutes ago I finished lecturing on polygenic traits to a freshman college biology class. This is amusingly timely.
Also, as one of my examples of how one person's "tall" can be very different from another person's, I use photos of Shawn Bradley and Shaquille O'Neal (for the non-NBA followers, think rubber band stretched to the 7'6" breaking point versus a normal healthy human grown to giant size), and after some student prompting I found this link about Shawn Bradley which seems fairly preposterous if true. A child of basically normal-sized parents (you can google photos) grows to 7'6" because (simplifying just slightly) he just happened to inherit the tall variant at every one of 2900 loci that affect height. https://news.byu.edu/news/byu-genetic-researchers-solve-giant-mystery-how-did-shawn-bradley-get-be-so-tall
7'6" 210 lb playing weight. Not sure if that's before or after he bulked up for the pros.
@2-- Some additional evidence for the 'American hockey players tend to shoot right because of baseball' theory: the only province in Canada where right shot sticks outsell left shot sticks is BC, which is also the province with the highest youth baseball participation rates.
17- More evidence that I'm not overweight, I'm a foot and a half underheight.
My son is left-handed and didn't show a preference until about age five. His preschool teacher took pictures of him writing and it seemed just a matter of chance what he picked. Shiv and I are both righties, and we suspect that he should be right-handed (apparently it's rare to be left-handed without a left-handed parent), but he took to doing everything with his left hand because he sucked his right thumb constantly as a little little.
re: 20
My son has been obviously left-handed since as long as I can remember. He always reached for things with his left, held his spoon with his left, etc. I'm pretty sure I remember my wife and I having conversations about him being left-handed before he was 1. Neither of us are left-handed, although my sister is, and i think one of my wife's siblings is.
Possibly one of you was switched from being a lefty. They didn't deliberately switch kids around here in the 70s, but they didn't go out of their way to not switch them unless you count that the lefty scissors were always in better shape the the regular ones.
I'm left for writing and right for most other things but I would probably be left for everything if I hadn't had that climbing accident and mucked up my left arm (strength and flexibility both rduced) while I was still young enough to learn to do stuff right handed.
Us too! Pokey is a lefty, but neither Jammies nor me is.
My dad was a lefty, and his sister (my paternal aunt, and godmother) was a lefty too. The nuns at my aunt's RC school tried to force her to write with her right hand, because left-handedness was apparently considered sinister, or something like that.
25 is a coincidence because nuns are also the reason I'm not more left-handed; the ones at the clinic I was taken to when I broke my arm made various fairly important mistakes in treatment resulting in permanent damage.
22: Not that I can recall. My mother is left-handed, and so is her mother, I think. In any case it's no more than a curiosity, although the kid has lousy handwriting and we've wondered if it's due to handedness (or more likely being six and having no interest in writing.)
Thanks for keeping people up on what's happening.
right-handed, but when I started ballet I discovered I turn better to the left [usually, the en-dedans side]. supposedly about an 80/20 split.
31: Interesting-- in gymnastics, most right-hand dominant people turn/twist left. [The basic reason is that if you cartwheel with your right foot in front you're turning left, and most people learn to cartwheel with their dominant foot in front/dominant hand down first.]
the kid has lousy handwriting
This has been today's realization that time continues to pass, and other people's babies grow up into children. Wow.
28: on the contrary. People think that if you want your child permanently damaged by nuns you have to send them to a Catholic school or an orphanage, but in fact they're really good at inclusive outreach.
It's interesting how deep the side preference can go. Most people who ever get into high speed cornering in a vehicle (i.e. track racing or 'spirited' on-street driving) have a fairly strong turn preference they have to work against.
On street riding (motorcycle) this can be quite pronounced and in a way that doesn't have anything to do with driver position - in a car you might expect off-side from your seat to be harder just because of visibility.
Skiing, definitely. I'm righthanded, and I turn right with much more ease and control.
31: if I spin to the left it's my right arm/side generating the force or moment to start the spin, the exact same way that I would when throwing right handed. So throw righty, spin to the left makes sense. Many sports motions are like that (i.e. for a righty, twist upper torso to the right to load things up, then uncoil to the left to throw the right shoulder forward).
39: yeah, you're not meant to twist or "wind up for the turn", but the arm closes to initiate the turn from that side.
38: for what it's worth I am also right handed (strongly) but find left hand turns easier on skis. Which I suppose matches motorcycles for me which is somewhat counter intuitive in a right-hand drive country.
I wonder if turning direction has anything to do with dominant eye, which isn't always the same as dominant hand.
Most rec hockey players (and rec skaters) are stronger turning left than right. Part is just cultural reinforcement: the standard direction of travel at an open skate is almost always counter-clockwise.
40: Interesting. Most gymnastics twists don't involve a wind-up either-- initiating by 'closing the arm' is more common. But because an important base-skill does involve a wind-up, the standard direction of twist is set by it.
(I guess I only de-lurk to discuss Canadian politics and the biomechanics of my two favourite sports.)
27: That's awful. Permanent (and, I take it, entirely preventable) damage from a broken arm is just not supposed to happen.
I guess I only de-lurk to discuss Canadian politics and the biomechanics of my two favourite sports.
Well, hockey, of course. But is it skating or gymnastics that is the second of your two favourite sports?
46: Gymnastics. Competed as a kid and coached for years.
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The email salutation "Hi Nworbie, Hope you are well!" is an almost infallible indicator of a worthless press release. In fact I had it set up for some months as a filter to delete emails unread until it turned out that there are a couple of real human beings who wish me good health in emails.
This morning, however, bought a doozy:
Hi Nworbie, Hope you are well! HIV Testing Week is coming up ...
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There was a guy I worked with briefly who started every email with "I hope this message finds you well." Third message of the day, same as if he had not communicated in a month.
I write left-handed. I throw right-handed. If I remember Tae Kwon Do correctly I kicked ambidextrously. Atossa seems uniformly right-handed. Re: 10, Atossa is four and I'm nowhere near buying her any kind of baseball glove, am I negligent? She takes dance and swim classes but the last attempt at a team sport didn't go well. For unstructured fun, she mostly still just prefers being chased in circles or playing pretend.
Re: 10, Atossa is four and I'm nowhere near buying her any kind of baseball glove, am I negligent?
I'm not a sports person, but I live in a baseball neighborhood (lots of Dominican immigrants) and if you want a baseball player, you do need to start now. My guess is that you don't want a ballplayer that much, but people who are in that world are definitely playing catch in an age-appropriate but pretty focused kind of way with their four-year-olds.
I'm not saying you should do this, of course. I raised my children in the grand tradition of incompetent rec-league soccer, and one or two years of coach pitch little league where they had no fun and got lice from the batting helmets. But little league was no fun because they didn't come into it with a sense of how to throw already.
51: Makes sense, thanks. I'm not a sports person and Cassandane is even less of one. I'm just (a) a little physical-fitness-conscious, given all the junk food and sedentary hobbies, and (b) looking for any alternative to games like this.
If you don't love baseball, I wouldn't worry about forcing it. In my outsider's opinion, it's a really high barrier-to-entry sport -- it's no fun at all until you're fairly skilled, and you need a whole team full of kids who are also fairly skilled. Incompetent rec league soccer is much easier to ramp up into without meaningful parental support: I'm completely, but completely useless, and they both got to being lousy but functional soccer players, who if they wanted to play for fun as adults would be able to. (Sally was actually on her high school varsity team for four years, but they were not a good team at all -- they had one very good player who bullied a bunch of incompetents into showing up so that she'd have some kind of team to play with.)
48: It would make me so happy if they really call you Nworbie.
re: 31, 32
Thats interesting. Because it feels like kickboxing works the opposite way, slightly. I fight/fought orthodox -- left leg forward, left hand forward* -- but I found that spinning to the right was slightly easier. That might just be habit/practice, but in orthodox stance you would often hit with the left leg, and then continue into a turning movement/spin, before hitting with the right leg. Whereas if you went to the left, that'd more often (just mechanics, range, etc) be a stepping rather than spinning movement. But thinking about my general lefty-ness except when writing, that might also be a partial explanation for why I find spinning to the right easier.
* in Frenchy boxing, you switch leads as part of combinations, but you usually end up back in whatever your normal "guard" is at the end of those.
My limited experience with baseball players (working out with them at 6am for two semesters) taught me that baseball players are assholes. So without a strong prior reason for baseball, I don't know why you'd direct your kid there.
re:55, 31
Never fought so can't speak to that, but I'm right handed, did gymnastics for a while and left hand spin was definitly easier (which matches my ski turn, etc).
53,56: Agree that baseball is probably not much fun for kids any more - everything is (over)organized by grownups, you can't just get a pickup game with other kids. On the other hand if you do learn how to throw and catch and hit, slow-pitch softball as an adult is where it all becomes fun again.
56: The nice way to put that is "Baseball in America's pastime."
56: The nice way to put that is "Baseball in America's pastime."
43.1- Crossing over I'm better turning left, hockey turns better going right. Both have my dominant (right) foot in front.
"My limited experience with baseball players (working out with them at 6am for two semesters) taught me that baseball players are assholes."
Is it just the foreign expat ones you don't like, or are the native ones bad too?
A friend in college was an RA for a dorm with a lot of athletes. He said the baseball players were awful because they didn't have enough activities to keep them busy or tired in fall so did things like dismantling water fountains and toilets. The football players were too tired to do much other than sleep.
In college, I lived with two football players and I can say that they didn't go in for elaborate pranks, but they sure did find the time to drink.