View from the North 40: Right hand doesn't care what the left is doing

Yes, 40 years is a long time to hold a grudge, but I think it’s safe to say, now, that my whole brain can let the resentment go, thanks to some German researchers and a small herd of horses.

In 1979 an art teacher named Betty Edwards wrote a book called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” that quickly became a bestseller. Because I was a young artist with some talent I was given a copy. Because I was a bit of a nerdy studier, I devoured the book — the first two chapters anyway.

The problem was that in chapter three Edwards said that I was defective because I was right-handed.

She looked at research done on people who had their corpus callosum — the information cable-like thingy connecting the two halves of the brain — severed.

Apparently people and other beings with two-hemisphere brains can function OK without this connection. I think it’s like having two computers sitting side-by-side but because they’re not networked together you have to share files by sending them back and forth via email.

Edwards, citing some credible research and wisdom passed down through the eons of mankind in the form of language, cultural norms and old sayings, wrote that the left half of the human brain is the birth place of things like language, step-by-step analysis, factual reasoning, the ability to track time and logic.

She said the right side, though, is the ancestral home of nonverbal communication, concrete and in-the-moment observation, open-mindedness, intuition, and the ability to make connections between things, thoughts, patterns, visuals, etc.

She went on to say that the right hand is linked to the left hemisphere and the left hand is linked to the right hemisphere. Basically, she said, because I’m right-handed I’m supposed to like numbers, follow directions, be on time and be logical. And I was all, “What?! Lady, you don’t know me at all. This is a steaming pile of bologna.”

Then every left-hander and their dog kept saying, “I’m in my right mind.” And I was all “No. You’re just a lefty.”

About the time I met the guy who would become my husband a new edition of Edwards’ book came out, so he would say, “Look, I’m a lefty. I’m in my right mind.” And I’d be all, “No. Your right arm was amputated, so you were forced to use your left hand. You’re really just only-handed. I don’t wanna be on time and do math. I just wanna draw pretty pictures.”

Edwards’ teaching methods proved to be very successful, but ironically because she used solid methods that didn’t rely on the left-right-hand-brain theory she titled the book on — which is good because that left-right-hand-brain theory was subsequently debunked.

But my resentment lived on, along with the myth of the right brain blah-blah-blah.

I’m ready to move on now, though.

German researchers Isabell Marr, Kate Farmer and Konstanze Krüger, who studied right-handedness and left-handedness — aka right- or left-dominance in the forelimbs and eyes, nose and other sensory organs — in a variety of animals from primates to rats to horses, have found that the animals that were right-handed were more optimistic.

Specifically, the horses who started walking by stepping out with their right foot first were more optimistic that a treat would be in a box in their pen, and they used more enthusiastic and inventive ways of getting the box open than the lefties did.

So yes, now that the research favors me and my fellow right-handers, I’m remarkably happy and willing to forgive.

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(Intuition + Logic) / (The Facts X That Gut Feeling) = Life > The Sum of All Your Parts + Any Boxes “They” Try to Stuff You Into, at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com/.