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left-handed + maths


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I saw a news article that was linking left-handedness to maths ability.

 

I have no idea of the rigour of the science behind it, but in my little family sample space it is true.

 

I have three children. The two that are lefties are very strong in maths. One is doing a Bachelor of Maths and the other is my 11yr old who I talk about here. My one righty is in the criminology field.

 

What about your children? Does this hold up for many of us here? Just curious  :)

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My very driven, math graduate student is totally ambidextrous.  As in, she taught herself to write in cursive with her lefthand in under 10 minutes and it was beautiful but she does use her right hand in daily life.  My son is left-handed to the extreme and while I think that he will make a fine engineer he certainly doesn't have the personality to pursue pure, theoretical mathematics like his sister.  

 

So I guess I wonder what is meant by math in this case because there is a huge difference between math through Calculus (which my mathy one calls computation or arithmetic) and proof based math.

 

For what it is worth, I am right-handed but my mother swears that is only because school forced me to be and i have a degree in engineering.  I play all sports left-handed and shoot a bow and gun left-handed as well.

 

My oldest is an engineer and there is no doubt that she is right handed.

 

My middle is the math major mentioned above.

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My mathy kid is ambidextrous.  It's a mixed bag in my family.  Some lefties and some righties.  But the lefties (older people) were heavily discouraged from using their left hand so use both depending on what it is.  It was difficult and confusing to try and help my kid learn how to write!  I didn't want to be obnoxious and discourage a lefty.  He kept switching back and forth...back and forth.  I really didn't know how to deal with that.  His handwriting is not good with either hand though! 

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Kind of true here.  One of my lefties is clearly my most mathy.  Except for the one lefty who is the most mathy of the six, the other one lefty and four righties are probably sort of even with each other in math strength - it's surprisingly difficult to compare because they have each had a different path so far in their math education, in part due to different developmental timetables and in part due to whatever the school was doing.  Unfortunately, it's also true that my two lefties have had more issues in other areas (language processing, handwriting/processing speed, reading speed).

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Is this the study you are referring to?

 

"'Handedness is an indirect expression of brain lateralisation,' Sala told MailOnline.

'For example, some - about 30 per cent - of left-handers have a more developed right hemisphere, which is related to spatial skills. So handedness may be a sign of specific brain patterns affecting cognition, which in turn affect mathematical performance.'

Some scientists believe the choice to use the left hand over the right is influenced by the way this hemispheric bias developed in the womb, when the fundamental structures of the brain were first formed.

'We also found that the degree of handedness and mathematical skills influenced by age, type of mathematical task, and gender,' said Sala.

For example, the most lateralised children, that means those who were very one-sided, either left- or right-handed, tended to under perform compared to the rest of the sample.

'However, this effect disappeared in male left-handed adolescents, who performed much better than their peers.'

'These results must not be considered definitive, but only a step towards the conception of a new and more comprehensive model of the phenomenon; A model able to account for all the discordant outcomes reported so far.' "

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3575345/Bad-maths-Blame-hand-write-Study-finds-left-handed-people-likely-better-arithmetic.html

 

My entire extended family is in applied maths. Math ability are all similar except those weak in math are all "extreme" right handers. However many right hander relatives (cousins, nephews, nieces, grandnieces, grandnephews) can write with the left including both my kids, so technically my family would be majority ambidextrous in writing. Either that or everyone learned to write with the right hand in preschool and self taught how to write script and cursive with the left hand. All the left handers cousins have right handers parents. Majority goes to bilingual preschool so being ambidextrous is useful for doing handwriting practice worksheets in English and Chinese.

 

There are left handers among my husband's relatives but all his relatives are "average" in math.

 

ETA:

Same "information" on Science Daily https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160505104844.htm

Edited by Arcadia
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I am extremely right handed, my DH is extremely left handed but writes with his right hand. My DS is ambidextrous, but favors his left hand over the right. Math comes easily to all three of us. DH and I use applied math in our professions. My DS is very good at mental math. 

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Without seeing the study in question, I have no opinion - and I'm not going to click a link to the Daily Mail, no way, no how. In my experience, people are constantly trying to link this trait or that trait to left-handedness. The rigor of these studies varies widely, and I at this point have given up on anything that depends on people self-reporting their handedness and look very skeptically at anything that doesn't spell out what they define as "being left-handed".

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Without seeing the study in question, I have no opinion - and I'm not going to click a link to the Daily Mail, no way, no how. In my experience, people are constantly trying to link this trait or that trait to left-handedness. The rigor of these studies varies widely, and I at this point have given up on anything that depends on people self-reporting their handedness and look very skeptically at anything that doesn't spell out what they define as "being left-handed".

 

I agree. 

It is very hard to know how much and why people use a specific hand. My children are all right handed including the two that are great at math. But 3 of my 4 children are left eyed. We do rifle training and that is why we know that. I'm cross dominant. I do gross motor skills with my right and am terrible, really terrible at throwing a ball or cutting with scissors with my left hand but when it comes to fine motor skills like handwriting on paper  or fine needlework  I have a very strong preference towards my left hand. My husband is also right handed and left eyed. 

 

I slowly noticed these specifics over the years as people questioned me, like a kid in my class asking a question about which hand I use because I kept switching back and forth at the white board or someone trying to find me left handed scissors because they assumed that is what I would need. When I was younger I wouldn't have though much of it and  would have just answered "left handed".  

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Without seeing the study in question, I have no opinion - and I'm not going to click a link to the Daily Mail, no way, no how. In my experience, people are constantly trying to link this trait or that trait to left-handedness. The rigor of these studies varies widely, and I at this point have given up on anything that depends on people self-reporting their handedness and look very skeptically at anything that doesn't spell out what they define as "being left-handed".

 

Oh totally.  I put no stock in these studies.  At most it shows some correlation, but so what. There are lots of weird correlations. 

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The source of the Daily Mail article I linked upthread is IFL Science's Are Left-Handed People More Gifted Than Others? Our Study Suggests It May Hold True For Maths http://www.iflscience.com/brain/are-left-handed-people-more-gifted-than-others-our-study-suggests-it-may-hold-true-for-maths/all/

 

"These peculiarities may be the reason why left-handers seem to have an edge in several professions and arts. For example, they are over-represented among musicians, creative artists, architects and chess players. Needless to say, efficient information processing and superior spatial skills are essential in all these activities.

...

That said, handedness is just an indirect expression of brain function. For example, only a third of the people with a more developed right hemisphere are left-handed. So plenty of right-handed people will have a similar brain structure as left-handers. Consequently, we need to be cautious in interpreting people’s hand preference – whether we see it as a sign of genius or a marker for cognitive impairment."

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My leftybaby loves math and seems to have a knack for understanding it. He writes lists of problems for himself to solve for fun. Now, he's not quite six yet, so how he's going to be later, I don't know. He's pretty dominantly lefty. Even as a young toddler, he'd reach across with his left hand to get a spoon plunked into the right side of his bowl.

 

My oldest son speaks math but is dominantly right handed. I am a mathy person as well, and I am right handed but also fairly ambidextrous and cross dominant; I do a lot of things naturally the way a lefty would. My only daughter is good at math but not necessarily gifted in that area; she's a righty but is very ambidextrous and has taught herself to write and do other things pretty decently with her left hand. My middle son seems to get math easily as well (my father is a math geek, so we get it honestly) and is right handed.

 

But then my little sister is the only one of us four kids who is a lefty, and math is not her strong point. So who knows?

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My child was pretty much ambidextrous at the beginning, but they slightly favored the left hand when learning to write (ages 3-6). I noticed that when they wrote with their right hand, sometimes they did whole word mirror writing without being aware of it. At age 6, a broken right arm led to fulltime lefthandedness. They recently broke their left arm at age 12, so they took a stab at trying to use the right hand again, much to their amusement. They ended up using a mouse-based computer drawing program to do their algebra homework. This child is strong in math, is a "visual-spatial" learner,and is super creative/imaginative. They are hoping to attend a performing arts high school.

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I'm not seeing a correlation in my family. My two youngest are both mathy - one is left handed (definite STEM kid) and one right handed. My older kids are not mathy. One is right handed - artsy and athletic, and one is left handed - into reading and science.

 

Now, handwriting...

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