Reposting Sunshine’s very interesting post, for all you lefties!

Credit: @nareejo

If you’re a David Archuleta fan raise your hand. I raised my left hand, how about you?

As soon as I found out David was left-handed – as am I – so many things clicked into place for me.

This David tweet for example: “I’ve noticed a pattern in my life of liking to look up statistics of random things. Populations, sales, names, etc. Not exactly sure why.”

I’ll tell you why, David. It’s probably because you’re left-handed. I’ve always been a Billboard chart and stats junkie too and research shows that we southpaws have a heightened degree of spatial awareness and sense of dimension, and we use visual cues – like charts and stats – to process information.

Bookends, N.J. Credit: Snarky Archies

What makes a person left-handed? It’s because the brain is “cross-wired” so that the left hemisphere controls the right-handed side of the body and vice-versa and hand dominance is connected with brain dominance on the opposite side. The left brain focuses on syntax and order (right-handed people), while the right brain monitors context and emotions (lefties).

This brain dominance makes left-handers more likely than right-handers to be creative and visual thinkers. This is supported by the higher-than-average percentages of left-handers found in certain jobs and professions — music and the arts and media, for example.

About 10% of men and 8% of women are left-handed, and archaeological evidence indicates that these percentages have been stable for thousands of years. So you could say David is one in 10 (or one in a million, depending on how you look at it 🙂 ).

With the book signings going on this past week, and videos of David autographing away with his left-hand, I dug up a few more fascinating facts about lefties:

Credit: RisingStarOutreach.com

• Leadership. About 66% of American presidents in the last 30 years were left-handed men. Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford were all left-handed presidents. Barack Obama and John McCain are both left-handed.

• Independence. Some experts believe left-handed people are more independent because they’ve had to get along in a world that’s not made for them — that lefties are slightly more resistant to social pressures.

• Adaptability. Canadian research shows that left-handed people are more adaptable than right-handed people. That is, a leftie can use his or her right hand to do tasks much easier than a rightie can use his or her left hand.

• Visual memory. Left-handed persons use visual stimulus to process information. Research reveals that people who are left-handed do not use the sequential processing style like their right-handed colleagues, to disseminate information. Instead they are good at applying themselves to multiple tasks with the help of the synthesis method of breaking down information and finding a solution.

• Musical aptitude. 50% of The Beatles are left handed (Paul and Ringo). (This has nothing to do with music but 1 in 4 Apollo astronauts were left-handed, which is 250% more than the normal level.) Other leftie musicians include:

um, this is real, by the way. Right, beebee? 🙂

Bach
Mozart
Robert Plant
Rachmaninoff
Paul Simon
Seal
Sting
Beethoven
Celine Dion
Bob Dylan
David Bowie
Phil Collins
David Foster
Stewart Copeland and Sting (both of The Police)
Bob Geldof
Glenn Frey
Glenn Gould
Jimi Hendrix
Annie Lennox
Wynton Marsalis
David Cook ☺

So, any other lefties out there?

— Sunshine

More Fox 13 photos HERE.