Books of The Times; Sinister Aspects of Left-Handedness
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: January 23, 1992
The Left-Hander Syndrome The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness By Stanley Coren Illustrated. 308 pages. The Free Press/Macmillan. $24.95.
At first, the prospect of reading Stanley Coren's surprising study, "The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness," looks like fun. You skim through the slightly too familiar stuff about left-handedness being equated throughout history with weakness, unluckiness and evil; or about the lingering in-group biases that make society treat the 10 percent of its members who are left-handed left-handedly. This is old news.
Instead you focus on the author's discovery that the term footman derived from the slaves posted by the door to be sure that guests visiting a house "entered with the right foot first." Or that the superiority of southpaws at playing baseball is a myth, the "sidedness" of big-leaguers reflecting the population at large; and, by the way, what probably helped Babe Ruth and Ted Williams to be such peerless southpaw sluggers was that both apparently were right-eyed, to judge from old photographs of them looking through a telescope and a camera respectively.
Or that in his search for clues to the inheritability of left-handedness, the author, who teaches psychology at the University of British Columbia, found himself in the Scottish castle of the famously left-handed Kerr family. ("In Scotland the terms kier-handit or ker-handit are used as slang for left-handed," writes Mr. Coren.) There he discovered that the staircases spiraled counterclockwise , the better, my dear, to fight off attackers while ascending, because of course the Kerrs fenced with foils in their left hands.
The book also contains little tests with which you can determine not only your handedness, but also your footedness, eyedness and earedness, and the degree of each.
Yet gradually you realize that Mr. Coren isn't simply at play in the field of left-sidedness. His more serious business begins to emerge when he wonders if left-handers are born or made. It seems that when he and a colleague surveyed some 5,000 people more than a decade ago, they found that while 15 percent of the population at age 10 was left-handed, there was a pronounced drop-off as people grew older, leaving 5 percent among 50-year-olds and less than 1 percent for those aged 80 and above. "Where have all the lefties gone?" he wondered.
Could it be that social pressure was turning lefties into righties? No, it could not because although sidedness can be trained, and still is pervasively in countries like Taiwan, this can only be done when the subject is very young and even then the conversion is confined to a specific task like writing or eating.
Now Mr. Coren's reasoning gets a little murky. If sidedness isn't trained, it must be inherited, although evidence seems to have established that left-handers are not simply mirror images of right-handers. That is, lefties don't seem to have right brain hemispheres that perform exactly as left brain hemispheres do for righties. (Mr. Coren pauses here to heap scorn on what he considers the absurd popularization of the two-mind theory, or the notion that rational, left-brained people can become more artistic by tapping into their "holistic" right brains. Things just don't work that way, he says.) In fact, the inheritance of sidedness doesn't follow the pattern of a genetically variable trait at all.
So Mr. Coren hypothesizes that sidedness is a genetically fixed trait (like two-eyedness or one-nosedness), and that right-handedness is the norm while left-handedness is right-handedness gone "wrong." And sure enough, there is a higher percentage of left-handers among people who have experienced stressed births, presumably because their left hemispheres were affected in some way. Sure enough, left-handers are statistically more likely to suffer all manner of disorders, ranging from alcoholism to bed-wetting to epilepsy to psychosis.
And finally, Mr. Coren discovered from cleverly devised statistical surveys, lefties have a shorter life expectancy than righties, by an average of 9 years in the general population! Either because of an accumulation of the ills they are more likely to suffer or because of the inevitable accidents caused by trying to negotiate a right-handed world, lefties experience what the author refers to as "reduced longevity." To dust is where all the lefties have gone.
Mr. Coren, who is right-handed but has a left-handed son, ends his book on an upbeat reformist note, urging lefties to protest so that people will pay more attention and prescribing such improvements as double-bladed band saws for the work place so lefties can stand on the opposite side when they cut. He has some good ideas, but they hardly compensate for the fairly dire news he has brought to some 33 million North Americans.
Mr. Coren also expresses astonishment that some of these people have acted so alarmed by his news, and he accuses newspapers and magazines of oversimplifying and exaggerating his findings. After all, he writes: "I am not suggesting that left-handers shuffle and shamble through life, requiring custodial care because they are too damaged to survive on their own. For most left-handers, the problems that result from the injury or pathology that we believe is present are not very large. They tend to show up when we look carefully, with an eye toward certain types of difficulties that are often not apparent to the nonscientist observing an average left-hander."
But he never does get around to explaining the hereditary nonpathological people he apparently believes account for half the left-handed population. If Mendelian genetics don't work for these individuals, then how exactly do they inherit their left-handedness?
And in one particularly grotesque metaphor of what he calls rare traits as problem signs, he likens the discovery of left-handedness to pressing down a single stuck black key of a neglected and mistreated second-hand piano that has been damaged by exposure to extremes of "uneven temperature." Is it really a surprise to him that left-handed people would rather not be referred to as damaged? Is it any wonder that they don't want to be called "warped"? Yet he creates a powerfully negative image of being left-handed in his otherwise useful and enlightening book.