h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There have been studies showing that left-handed people tend to die younger. Scientists speculate that it's due to the stresses of having to cope with a world that's wired 'backwards'.

I see the need for another suppport group.

quizzical
(happily ambidextrous)

Yeah, it's bizarre that, I think I wrote about it in my lefty entry.

Bizarre - someone else who's ambidextrous... there aren't really many of us around! I was just about to comment on the other thread that most people who claim to be ambidextrous say that they lost the ability to do things with both hands when they were about 6/7, usually because teachers or other kids thought them strange. I normally write with a pen in each hand and have two equally neat but otherwise totally different handwritings. It's impossible for me to forge my left handwriting with my right hand and vice-versa. I can also write backwards completely well with both hands, which most people find quite freaky!

I'm actually looking for ambidextrous people to help me with a guide entry on ambidexterity. Hopefully the psychology department at my university (Oxford) will be able to give me a bit of info on it.

Ooo - I'd be happy to help with a guide entry! You're right, there aren't very many ambidextrous folks around.

Some strange info: in my family the men all write left-handed and the women all write right-handed. I started out right-handed and became more left-handed as I grew up, which is weird even for my family. I also write backwards with both hands. In fact, I can form mirror-image letters as well as just writing the words backwards.

When I was learning to ice skate, I drove my coach crazy because I jump and spin in both directions, which is very, very unusual. She always felt like she had to demonstrate moves in her 'bad' direction - I never convinced her that I 'saw' the move in both directions no matter what she did.

At school (oh so many years ago) we had a French mistress (easy tiger) who would start writing right handed, turn to the class, swap hands with the chalk and start to write again with the other hand.

How splendid! I one bewildered my class at school by writing a table on the board using one hand for the left of it and the other for the right. My tutor was so interested that he didnt really notice that the presentation itself was a pile of dung!

Did you do them both at the same time?

While there are a few papers (by Stan Coren) that claim to find a link between handedness & longevity it is generally accepted in the scientific literature that this is not the case: those papers are badly flawed statistically, see Chris McManus's brilliant book "Right hand, left hand." Numerous papers have looked at this question and found no relationship. There is a connection between handedness & some illnesses (both physical and mental) but lefties need not worry about dieing young.