Chart: The Countries With The Most Left-Handed People

Handedness

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Feb 4, 2020

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This chart shows the rate of left-handedness in selected countries.

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Health Risks and Other Facts

About 10 percent of the population is left-handed. The rest are right-handed, and there are also about 1 percent who are ambidextrous, which means they have no dominant hand.

Not only are lefties outnumbered about 9 to 1 by righties, there are health risks that appear to be greater for left handers, too.

A 2007 study published in the British Journal of Cancer examined hand preference and cancer risk. The study suggested that women with a dominant left hand have a higher risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer than women with a dominant right hand.

The risk difference is more pronounced for women who have experienced menopause.

However, researchers noted the study only looked at a very small population of women, and there may have been other variables that affected the results. The study concluded further investigation is needed.

A 2011 study from the American College of Chest Physicians suggested that left handers have significantly higher chances of developing periodic limb movement disorder (PLMD).

This disorder is characterized by involuntary, repetitive limb movements that happen while you sleep, resulting in disrupted sleep cycles.

A 2013 Yale University study focused on the left and right handedness of outpatients in a community mental health facility.

The researchers found that 11 percent of the patients studied with mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder, were left-handed. This is similar to the percentage of the general population, so there was not an increase in mood disorders in those who were left-handed.

However, when studying patients with psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, 40 percent of the patients reported writing with their left hand. This was much higher than what was found in the control group.

A 2007 study published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress screened a small sample of nearly 600 people for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The group of 51 people who met the criteria for a possible PTSD diagnosis contained significantly more left handers. Left-handed people also had significantly higher scores in arousal symptoms of PTSD.

The authors suggested the association with left handedness may be a robust finding in people with PTSD.

A 2011 study published in The British Journal of Health Psychology indicated that left handers reported consuming more alcohol than right handers. This study of 27,000 self-reporting participants discovered that left-handed people tended to drink more often than right-handed people.

However, in fine-tuning the data, the study concluded that left handers were not more likely to binge drink or become alcoholics. The numbers did not indicate a “reason to believe that it is associated with excessive alcohol consumption or risky drinking.”

It appears that left handers have other disadvantages when compared to right handers. Some of these disadvantages can, in some cases, be related to future healthcare issues and access.

According to a 2009 study published in Demography, left hand dominant children are liable not to perform as well academically as their right handed peers. In skills such as reading, writing, vocabulary, and social development, left handers scored lower.

The numbers did not substantially change when the study controlled for variables, such as parental involvement and socioeconomic status.

A 2014 Harvard study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives suggested that left handers in comparison to right handers:

• have more learning disabilities, such as dyslexia
• have more behavior and emotional problems
• complete less schooling
• work in jobs that require less cognitive skill
• have 10 to 12 percent lower annual earnings

Although left handers have some disadvantages from a health risk perspective, they also have some advantages:

• A 2001 study of over 1. 2 million people concluded that left handers did not have a health risk disadvantage for allergies and had lower rates of ulcers and arthritis.
• According to a 2015 study, left-handed people recover from strokes and other brain related injuries faster than right-handed people.
• A 2006 study suggested that left hand dominant people are faster than right hand dominant people at processing multiple stimuli.
• A 2017 study published in Biology Letters indicated that left hand dominant athletes in certain sports have a much higher representation than they do in the general population. For example, while about 10 percent of the general population is left hand dominant, about 30 percent of the elite pitchers in baseball are lefties.

Lefties can also be proud of their representation in other areas, such as leadership: Four of the last eight U.S. presidents — Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama — have been left-handed.

Although left hand dominant people represent only about 10 percent of the population, they appear to have higher health risks for certain conditions, including:

• breast cancer
• periodic limb movement disorder
• psychotic disorders

Left handers also appear to be at an advantage for certain conditions including:

• arthritis
• ulcers
• stroke recovery

Left, right.

Scientists have found that a person has not only a “leading” hand, but also a leg, an ear and an eye

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Pexels

Why alone one third of the world drives on the left and two thirds on the right? Why does European writing go from left to right, while Arabic and Hebrew go from right to left? Science has already found answers to some questions, but it still struggles with some paradoxes of asymmetry in nature, body and culture. The book “Why the heart is on the left, and the hands of the clock move to the right. Secrets of the Asymmetry of the World” by Professor Chris McManus, which received the Royal Society of London Prize for the Development of Knowledge of Nature for the Popular Science Book of the Year, was recently published in Russian.

Bombora

With the permission of the Bombora publishing house Vedomosti. City” publishes an excerpt.

In general, both in the UK and throughout the West, left-handed people make up just over ten percent, although the proportion is slightly lower among older people and in some other regions of the world.

If among men there are 11.6% left-handers, then among women – only 8.6%. That is, for some reason, left-handedness is more characteristic of men than women. This result has been replicated many times in many studies, and overall found that there are just over five left-handed men for every four left-handed women. Not a very big difference, but it seems to persist forever and should reflect something important in the biology of left-handedness. Signs of this gender difference can be seen even in the family of Charles Darwin himself, in which three out of eight men (38%) and only one in six women (17%) were left-handed.

Right-handedness is more pronounced than left-handedness. This is partly due to the fact that left-handers live in a “right-handed world”, where a variety of objects, from a microwave oven to a computer or piano keyboard, are arranged mainly “under the right hand”. As a result, left-handers are forced to adapt to a right-handed world and often use their right hand despite their natural inclination to use their left.

“Left-footed” soccer players and dominant eyes

Although right-handed versus left-handed people have been discussed so far, some people prefer to talk about favoring one side or the other, because many behaviors seem to be associated with a preference for one side of the body and involve hands, feet, eyes, ears, etc. Some of these asymmetrical acts correlate with left- and right-handedness, but not all. The tendency to use one or the other hand fully applies to the legs: as a rule, for right-handers, the leading foot is the right, for left-handers, the left. It’s easy to check this – ask someone to kick the ball into the goal, and the foot that kicks the ball will be the leading one.

This property of professional football players is assessed by which foot they dribble the ball more often – left or right. Most of them use their lead foot 85% of the time, and almost no one uses both feet equally often. In other words, even professional football players do not use both legs equally well, they are not ambidexters in this sense. Like all other people, twenty percent of footballers are “left-footed”, and this proportion is significantly higher than the usual ten percent left-handed for any population.

You can also determine the dominant ear – mainly by which of them people hold the phone. About 60% prefer to listen with the right ear, 40% – with the left, right-handers prefer the right, left-handers prefer the left. Although this feature has been little studied in the past, the situation is now changing with the near ubiquity of mobile phones.

In contrast to the almost imperceptible “leading ear” problem, the question of the dominant eye has been studied more thoroughly. To determine which eye is your dominant eye, stretch out your hand and point to a small object in the distance. Now close one eye. If the finger is still aligned with the object, then the open eye will be the leading one. If you look with the other eye, not the leading one, then the finger will no longer point at the object. This is “sighting”, or ocular, dominance – the preference to see the object with one or the other eye. The dominant eye is easily determined if you ask which eye a person looks through the keyhole or into the eyepiece of a microscope. About 70% of people prefer to look with the right eye, about 30% – with the left. Although lefties tend to favor the left eye and righties tend to favor the right, many people are crosslateral, meaning their dominant eye and dominant hand do not match.

Exercises for the Curious

There are many other functional asymmetries that usually do not attract much interest – for example, most people prefer to chew with the right side of their jaws. And yet I have long been interested in two features, completely trivial and unimportant – how people fold their arms and cross their hands. To test this, quickly bring your hands together so that your fingers are intertwined. Which thumb is on top, right or left? Now try to do it the other way around, and you will have to think for a moment, the action itself will take longer, and it will even seem that the fingers are intertwined not so conveniently. The first instinctive movement you made was easier and more natural. This movement is not learned, in fact, people don’t even notice it unless they are pointed out to it.

In Britain, almost 60% of people have their left thumb on top, and this proportion is the same for right-handers and left-handers. It is particularly interesting that as one moves east—through Europe, Asia, and toward Oceania—the proportion of those with the left thumb on top decreases, and in the Solomon Islands, east of New Guinea, only thirty percent of people have the left thumb on top. . Even more puzzlingly, this property is transmitted in the genus, although rather weakly, so that the child of parents who have the left thumb on top is most likely to inherit this feature.

Another asymmetry that you can test for yourself is the folded hands. Cross your arms quickly. Which wrist is on top, right or left? Now try it differently. When I asked to do this in a lecture, there was invariably a burst of laughter, when people, twirling their hands in front of them, invariably realized that they had come to the same place where they started – the same wrist was on top all the time. Trying to place the other wrist on top was invariably difficult, you had to think about it, and it felt strange. In the UK, the left wrist is on top in about 60% of people, and this proportion is the same not only among right-handers and left-handers, but also among those who, when crossing their hands, the right or left thumb is on top. Thus, left-handedness and right-handedness, crossing of the hands and folding of the hands have different causes. The list of small asymmetries is almost endless. For example, one in five people can move their ears, and of those who can only move one ear, there are twice as many who can only move their left as those who can only move their right. Surprisingly and strangely enough, but the reasons for the existence of this kind of asymmetry are currently almost completely unknown.

However, the preference for left or right does require an explanation, and for many reasons scientists have put a lot of effort into behavioral asymmetries.

Is the child right-handed or left-handed?

So when does it become clear whether a child will become right-handed or left-handed? Determining the dominant hand in young children is not easy, especially in the first two years of life. In particular, it seems that there is a certain stage known as the “chaotic phase”, when the child almost daily prefers one or the other hand – today the right, tomorrow the left.

Since the dominant hand can be clearly identified only in the second year of life, scientists did not see much point in studying which side the child prefers before this age. However, fetal behaviorist Peter Hepper of Queen’s University Belfast vehemently dismisses this approach as misguided. With the help of ultrasound scanning, he studied several hundred unborn babies and found out that the fetus sucks a finger in the womb after 12 weeks of pregnancy, and at more than 90% of cases it is the finger of the right hand. There is a temptation to explain this by brain asymmetry, since the first signs of asymmetry of the cerebral cortex are also found at the same stage of development. However, later Hepper, studying the behavior of a ten-week-old fetus, found out that at this stage the finger is not yet sucked, but the arms and legs are already moving. He decided to find out which hand the fetus moves more often – and it turned out that in 85% of cases – the right one. This cannot be taken as an indication that the asymmetry of the brain occurs earlier than previously thought, because at such an early stage of development, the neurons of the brain are not yet connected to the spinal cord. Such an early asymmetry of behavior is thus associated with the spinal cord or with the limbs themselves, and therefore there is a possibility that the preference for one side or another is formed not in the cerebral cortex, but at some lower level of the nervous system, but as well as on which one is still unknown.

It is indisputable, however, that left-handedness and right-handedness are a family trait. Some time ago, the late Phil Bryden and I went through every paper on this subject that we could find in the scientific literature, which together amounted to more than 70,000 children whose parents were either only right-handed, only left-handed, or, as in the family Darwin, one of the parents was right-handed, the other was left-handed.

It turned out that the chance of having a left-handed child in two right-handed parents is 9,5%; in case one is left-handed and the other is right-handed – 19.5%, and for two left-handers – 26.1%.

These figures make a lot of sense. There are no “purebred” right-handers and left-handers, two left-handers have right-handed children, two right-handers have left-handers. In fact, most of the children of two left-handers are right-handed – three out of four. Yet it is more likely that left-handed children will also be left-handed. Does this mean that left-handedness is a genetic trait? Not necessarily, because many family traits are not passed down genetically—money is perhaps the most obvious example. If your parents were very rich, then you probably are too, although there are no genes for wealth, the money passes to you by virtue of cultural inheritance, which is part of what biologists loosely call “environment.”

Is a “left” turn possible in Russia?

https://ria.ru/20161206/1482945133.html

Is a “left” turn possible in Russia?

Is a “left” turn possible in Russia? – RIA Novosti, 05/26/2021

Is a “left” turn possible in Russia?

Left political parties and public organizations can be pushed to the periphery of the political process, says Pavel Rodkin, a member of the Zinoviev Club.

2016-12-06T14:57

2016-12-06T14:57

2021-05-26T16:28

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Zinoviev Club, Analytics, Russia

Zinoviev Club, Analytics, Russia

Pavel Rodkin, Ph.D.

Changes in the political system of Russia related to past Duma elections, a number of high-profile recent appointments, as well as the results of the presidential elections in the United States and the upcoming 2018 presidential campaign in Russia mark the contours of a new political reality. Already today we can talk about a trend towards rigid pragmatism, at the same time as squeezing out leftist ideologies, political parties and social movements in their current form to the periphery of the country’s political life.

Pragmatists instead of ideologists: the question of ideology is closed

Lavrov: pragmatic cooperation is in the common interests of Russia and the United States

November 30, 2016, 13:03

pragmatists. It seems that the new political system and social life no longer needs “ideologists”. The issue of ideology is closed and acquires a purely technical, managerial character.

The ruling party, as the largest and most consolidated part of the political class, becomes the core of Russia’s political system. The right and left political forces were left with a minimum percentage of participation, which was indicated by the results of the last Duma elections.

This configuration again, like the nineties, poses a serious political task for all Russian parliamentary and non-parliamentary left parties and movements: not to fall out of public life, not to become marginalized, while retaining their own ideological principles. Moreover, the sympathies of the Russian political elite are clearly not on the side of left-wing values, socialist and communist ideology.

© RIA Novosti / Alexei Nikolsky | Go to media bankFirst Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko before a meeting in the Kremlin on the financial provision of state obligations in the social sphere. October 6, 2016

Interesting in this respect are the attempts of almost artificial consolidation of liberal (pro-Western) parties, their removal from the marginal field of non-systemic opposition, political rebranding, laundering and integration into the system. For various reasons that are not so interesting today, neither Mikhail Prokhorov nor Boris Titov coped with this task of creating a moderate right-wing, liberal opposition.

The political center and the ruling party really look attractive compared to the ultra-liberals, who in public opinion are associated with the destruction of the state, but ideologically lose out to the left. Leftist ideas, reflecting the interests of the majority, can objectively exist in such a system only at the level of rhetoric, which is more and more at odds with real social policy.

It is these semantic voids that give rise to uncomfortable political questions and violate the established stability that are proposed to be resolved by stopping the systemic ideological discussion in society, which again became unnecessary for the authorities.

The new social contract is that ideology is no longer discussed, the system can no longer be disturbed, it must be accepted, not discussed and worked to strengthen it. It should be noted that against the background of external challenges, growing instability throughout the post-Soviet space, such a model has its own attractiveness.

What is it like to be “leftist” in the new political reality?

Pamfilova: social stratification is a factor in the growth of crime

March 23, 2016, 00:42

Social stratification, which is growing and accelerating throughout the world, gives rise to ideological stratification. Socialism and communism, like a hundred years ago, are losing their luster, becoming a false knowledge of the masses. Once again, this ideology cannot be discussed positively in public.

The Russian Left finds itself in the same position as the Western Left, degenerated almost into its ideological opposite – into the most radical neo-liberals. The legal left (by analogy with “legal Marxism in the tsarist empire”) in the new political system can only exist as a decorative element, which, by the way, has become a constant subject of accusations of CPRF opportunism by alternative small communist parties and Marxist cells that emerge in Russia as a reaction on neoliberal social policy.

© RIA Novosti / Alexei Malgavko | Go to mediabankParticipants of the procession in Omsk, dedicated to the 99th anniversary of the Great October Revolution

In any other capacity, the left has no place in the new political system, which no longer needs compromises. Today, anti-Sovietism has in fact already become a specific form of careerism, which on the whole corresponds to the sentiments of the political kass, which so often make themselves felt in monumental and historical politics.

A specialist in socialist and communist convictions automatically becomes a radical who, by definition, does not fit into the system. The leftists are ideologically and classwise alien to the Russian de-ideologized society.

The problem is that the left in Russia are statesmen, and minimizing their participation in legal politics will be a serious demoralizing blow to the majority. Employees are losing their party representation, they are losing the means of conveying their values ​​to the elite.

All left-wing movements in Russia, ironically, are moving to a new stage of existence in the landmark year 2017. The left parties will have to adapt to the new conditions in conditions of limited resources, lack of funds, increased internal competition between disparate groups, the struggle for the Marxist-Leninist heritage, for the minds and moods of people.

Left turn as an alternative

At the crossroads: will the Russian state remain social?

April 19, 2016, 03:18 PM

But it is precisely at this difficult time for the left that people are increasingly talking about the left turn. Is such a turn real, or is it another self-deception of a society that has become disillusioned with liberalism and capitalism and has begun to fully experience all the delights of neoliberal reforms?

The fact is that the existing version of neoliberal capitalism, due to the contradictions accumulated in it, cannot provide the masses with a decent life. Within the framework of such a system, social transformations cannot be implemented in the interests of the majority, and not a narrow group of the class of owners and the bureaucracy.

The current political configuration has indicated a trend towards the final consolidation of a social project of a certain type: the socio-political and socio-economic system of modern Russia is becoming bourgeois, in the most negative sense of the word. But such a system cannot consolidate society.

Left hook, or Russia’s main weapon in the fight against the West

April 13, 2015, 16:04

The new political reality means the need to find a new strategy for the existence of leftist forces, reproduction and forms of propaganda of their ideas in society.