Why Righties and Lefties? Scientists Have Hands Full, written by David Brown, is an article published in The Washington Post, March 2009. This is a fun article that speculates on why some individuals become left handed. One area of discussion is onlateralization:
“Lateralization saves space and, therefore, working capacity, by not requiring that both hemispheres do the same thing. It diminishes the chance of interference and confusion, which might arise if each side of the brain independently analyzed the same input from the environment and came up with its own decisions about what to do about it.”
This article also ties in so many areas that we have been currently discussing at PRI, such as, eye dominance:
“Prenatal effects are much clearer in chickens, where lateralization is largely determined by which eye is exposed to light coming through the shell during incubation. In most chick embryos, it’s the right eye. That produces adult birds that are better at identifying food and prey using the right eye (with the information processed on the left side of the brain), and better at detecting predators and sexual advances using the left eye (and right side of the brain).”
To read the entire article, click here!
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