Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pterodactyl.cis.ohio-state.edu!zwicky From: zwicky@pterodactyl.cis.ohio-state.edu (Elizabeth D Zwicky) Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: Handedness Keywords: handedness Message-ID: <45148@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 25 Apr 89 15:22:50 GMT References: <0ejKI2d3Uw1010VXzqU@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> <1256@mmm.UUCP> <5463@cs.Buffalo.EDU> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Elizabeth D Zwicky Distribution: na Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 35 In article <5463@cs.Buffalo.EDU> dmark@sunybcs.UUCP (David Mark) writes: >Now, left-right is by far the least salient of our three orthogonal axes. >Up-down dominates, and front-back is obvious. I think we have to be >'trained' on left-right, too, and that it is not as 'natural' as the others. >I know I have trouble, and almost always have to think about it, and check >my wrists for watches! How salient the left/right distinction is differs from person to person. The more strongly you have a dominant brain hemisphere, the easier it is to tell left from right. If you don't have a terribly dominant hemisphere, you may be strikingly unable to tell the difference (for instance, you may go into reverse instead of turning on your turn signals in a car with the shift on the steering column; take illegible phone messages by writing with the hand you don't know how to write with; and turn the volume on your TV all the way up when you wanted to turn it off, all of then things I have been known to do). On the other hand, if you have a clearly dominant hemisphere, you may be unable to think of a reason why one would be unable to tell them apart; they will simply seem intuitively different. This can lead to unfortunate consequences (quote from an operator here: "You mean there's a reason I can't tell left from right? My boyfriend just says I'm stupid!"). Women in general have less hemispheric dominance than men; people who are at all left-handed generally have less dominance than people who are right-handed. Observation leads me to believe that both linguists and computer scientists have a higher proportion of non-dominant people than the population at large, although I have no data on it, and the fact that multi-button mice are reasonably popular among computer scientists would seem to be a counter-argument. (The only saving grace about a Sun mouse is the Sun keyboard, which handily indicates right and left. People don't snicker as much as they do if you tape up a sign with right and left marked up on it.) Elizabeth Zwicky