‘I’ve wondered, ‘What if I had joined the left-handed 10%?’’
Remember the 1960s TV series Lost in Space? There was a sinister stow-away on the Robinson family’s spaceship: Dr Zachary Smith, a psychologist and environmental expert who hid on board before launch when he realised that he would not be going into space.
There was a slight strangeness to the TV series, which was missing from the 1998 film.
The word ‘sinister’ is
Latin for ‘left’. However, in English, ‘sinister’ implies something potentially harmful or evil. My interest is this: in the 1950s, my mother encouraged me to write and draw not with my left but my right hand. At the age of four, I accepted that, but couldn’t understand why.
It has been thought that left-handed people are more creative but, in June 2019, Psychology Today published an article – based on new research with 20,539 participants – which debunked this, although it did find greater creativity in people who favoured one hand strongly for all activities.
I caused consternation during my year at The Glade Infants School in Bognor (1959 to 1960) because I wrote everything in ‘mirror’ writing, and eventually was escorted home by my class teacher and the head, who wanted ‘a few words with my mum’. The Australian State of Victoria has an interesting web page on left-handedness, which says that ‘Left-handed children learning to write often write back to front… This is a natural inclination, not a sign of dyslexia, and will resolve given time, practice and encouragement.’ Curiously, I was ‘right-handed’ by then.
Given my history of doing daft things (see previous issues), the following made me laugh: ‘Brain damage – a small percentage of researchers theorise that all human beings are meant to be right-handed, but some type of brain damage early in life causes left-handedness… [but] … there is no hard evidence to support this rather controversial theory.’
I became right-handed but have always wondered, ‘What if I had joined the lefthanded 10 per cent?’ It’s a fascinating subject, but it is correct that best advice nowadays is to let children be as they will.