Why lefties are more predisposed to becoming geniuses 1

08/08/2018

A study by the University of Liverpool indicates that they have a greater capacity to solve complex mathematical operations.
24 July, 2017 16:39
José Andrés Gómez
From Leonardo Da Vinci to Napoleon, to Jimi Hendrix, Bill Gates, Charles Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Aristotle, Mozart, Beethoven or Albert Einstein. Many of the great geniuses of History are-or were-left-handed. Due to this, there is a widespread belief in the collective imagination that points out that left-handers are beings with superior abilities to those of the rest of mortals who use the right to develop in their daily life. But what is true about all this?
To date, we knew that between 8% and 13% of the world's population is left-handed, that this particularity occurs three times more in men than in women and that, in addition to having greater physical prowess, left-handers develop better in complex situations, as a study from the University of Athens said a few years ago.
Well, a new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology by researchers from the University of Liverpool and the University of Milan, has just shed some light on the matter. As researchers Giovanni Sala and Fernando Gobet say in The Conversation, left-handers have a right cerebral hemisphere (the one in charge of spatial reasoning, language or mathematics) more developed than the rest of humans.
In addition, the corpus callosum - the bundle of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres - is usually larger in left-handed people. "This suggests that some lefties have greater connectivity between the two hemispheres and therefore superior information processing," the researchers point out. The reason, as they explain, is not clear yet: "Some theories point out that living in a world designed for right-wingers could force left-handed people to use both hands, thus increasing connectivity." Thus, as the experts point out, it is not surprising that there is an overrepresentation of lefties in the world of music and the arts.