Are you really right handed? | Bob Duran | TEDxHartford

We're going to be light on this presentation, so you're going to have to bear with me, so the first thing I'm going to ask you to do is, if you're

right

-

handed

, could you please stand up? Well, take a look around you. Now if you would sit down if you are left

handed

could you please get up? okay, look around now you can sit here you probably recognize this these are the tools of my torture in elementary and middle school so I'll stick with it, I freely admit it, so I walked into a classroom, I sat down my

right

hand, a desk, I opened my folder with my right hand and proceeded to take notes with a pen, a ballpoint pen, and a little-known fact that you probably weren't aware of.

The fact that pens were designed to be pulled and not pushed and anyone who is left-handed, which it seems like could be two of us, one of the things you recognize is the ink that you would write with or the tip if you had nibs. pencil. up on the bottom of your hand and finally there is this torture device, the scissors, the bane of my kindergarten existence, would end up upside down and stuck to my thumb, almost cost me another year in kindergarten, so my topic tonight, my topic tonight is lateral vision. We tend to think that we are right-handed or left-handed based on which hand we eat with or which hand we write with, however, what you are going to discover tonight is that it is much more complicated than that and in fact, we have a number of behaviors in which we favor the left side or the right side, so through this talk today we will find out how left-handed or right-handed you

really

are to do that, there are a couple of topics that I need to touch on one very briefly is how our brain secondly I'm going to talk about the cultural vision of right and left handed people and finally I'm going to talk about lateral and we're going to do some more exercises and find out what is lateral right or left eyes, you

really

are, as you probably know, we have two hemispheres of the brain, a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere, and those two hemispheres are connected by a band of nerds known as the corpus callosum, the function of those nerves is actually a neural pathway for the two hemispheres to talk to each other so there is communication to come and go our left hemisphere is primarily our logical hemisphere it is a hemisphere in which we are contained mathematics analytical skills are contained planning is contained and for me as a communication teacher or verbal and written communication resides it is where communication digital is our right hemisphere is our aesthetic hemisphere our gestalt hemisphere is a hemisphere responsible for form using sound rhythm for perceptions for feelings for intuition is again from a communication perspective is our non-verbal hemisphere is our analog hemisphere now It is important to note that our left hemisphere controls our right side and our right hemisphere controls our left side that the two hemispheres are connected now that the information I gave you is kind of a general conclusion as to In fact, both hemispheres had the capacity of the other, but not as refined and developed.

Also, women tend to be less hemispherically specialized than men, meaning they have more capabilities in both hemispheres and then there are left-handed people like me, here they come. in a couple different flavors, or there is a mirror opposite to right-handed people, so that language resides not in the left hemisphere but in the right and non-verbal skills are not in the right hemisphere but in the left, or it could spread where all those abilities are found in both hemispheres. Now I say this because in part the way our brains are organized gives us a propensity to be more right-handed than left-handed.

Some people claim that the right hemisphere is the most active or most active. The left hemisphere is the most active hemisphere. Now let's turn to the culture and see what the culture says about being right-handed and left-handed. We can make it into religion first when Jesus ascended to heaven and didn't know which side of God he sat on. The right side and Satan, the fallen angel, had previously occupied the left side. We can also search for other Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist religions. The left hand is dirty, but then we can look at the language and see how it reflects on the language.

Anyone who knows French. you know what the word left is in French right gauche, which when we use ghost here what it means is distasteful, distasteful, exaggerated, certainly not a positive impression, now let's see who went to a Catholic school and had to take Latin as Myself, does anyone know what the Latin word for left is? Very good, sinister, again, not a very good label, but we can also see it in our common vernacular, so you guys have been breathing well. Now let's discover the snowboarders we have here. Yes, most snowboarders snowboard with the left foot forward and the right foot back, but if they are turned around, some are such that the left foot is back and the front foot is the right foot.

Does anyone know what style is called straight, is that a dumb style? again not a snowboarder again not very not very flattering now again this is like a song you have to play along here if you get jumped if you're not included what are you? you're left out if it's an idea it comes from nowhere you have no idea where it came from it comes from left field and if I'm right I'm right again I'm right we see this kind of cultural influence that certainly favors the side right over the left side, this now brings us to laterality and more calisthenics for you in a few minutes many of our behaviors are asymmetrical, that is, they actually call from one side of the body instead of the other side of the body, e.g. greet, shake your fist, wink an eye, roll an eye. in the telescope crossing one leg over the other or all the lateralized behaviors once you do your activity on one side versus the other and here's one of the things that I find interesting about this, from infancy to about four, four months or four years, we come and go.

So, for example, at sixteen weeks babies will raise both hands to make contact, at about twenty-four weeks they will raise their left hand to make contact and then again at twenty-eight weeks they will have two hands again, so they will go forward. and back to the left. -both until about age four, when they begin to show a preference for the left side or the right side and then, at about age eight, they become reified, that is, they are left-handed or right-handed. Now I get what is so fascinating to me about this. We go from left to right, you would expect it to be 50/50, but as you showed here and what we see in the population, about ninety percent of the population is right-handed and only 10% are left-handed, so why are there A couple of explanations, as I said before, some people will suggest that because the left hemisphere controlling the right side is the more active hemisphere, we have a propensity to be more right-handed, we certainly can't ignore the role of culture in this, we see that there is a cultural bias. against lefties, this probably just illustrates how old I am, but in third grade in 1967 or '63 I had a third grade teacher who tied my left hand to the desk so I couldn't use it to write because as she said or pointed out to me which was the devil's hand, so he was trying to force me to write with my right hand.

Needless to say, there weren't many apples on her desk, but my parents were very happy with that, but it shows. how strong that bias could be and that was just in 1963 so we see the influence of culture certainly the tools as I pointed out the deaths are scissors and almost any power tool you shouldn't use because they are designed for right handed people and We can also ignore the training as with the left hand I write with the left hand I do almost everything with the left hand except the sports that I do all with the right hand why because my first coach my father was right-handed and that's how he taught me so the training plays a big role in it so we can't ignore the brain's role of culture and training and take it one way or the other so now it's time to find out how lateralized you really are so let's start with this .

I would ask you to wink at me, you don't know how strange that looks standing here, but thank you very much, okay, then let's show with our hands how many people wink with their right eye, their left eye, both, oh, you're popular, okay, let's do what I. call Dwayne Johnson's rock test raise an eyebrow how many people can raise your right eyebrow your left eyebrow can you do both? Oh, that's pretty good. I can't do it either. I look like I am. I am surprised in a very painful way now imagine that I was speaking very quietly and you have difficulty hearing me.

Which ear would you cup and turn to hear what he had to say? Alright, another way to get at this is imagine your cell phone, take your cell phone. We don't have to do that now, but what year would you pick up two? It should be the same one you returned. We can also get to it and in another way, and this would be the opposite here if you can imagine that someone knocks on the door. the door gently or you hear a thug against the wall or you hear a dripping faucet, which ear would you turn to?

It should be the opposite ear to what you would use for your phone because you are trying to identify an ambient sound. I have another test. I know again Oh, what are you using left or right because these are lateralized behaviors. I'm going to ask you to count on your hand, so one, two, three, four, so do it, one, two, three, four, no, I know which finger you're using to count. with and for me it's my left, which would be consistent with everything I do one, two, three, four, okay, now we're back to aerobics, I need all of you, it's going to hold up, okay, let's do a couple of things here, one like You may or may not know that you're on hip now if we have to wait in line for a long time, one of the things we're going to do is rest on one hip, so which hip are you resting on now?

For me, it is my right now if we had to wait long enough, we would switch to the other hip but return to this hip. Ok, now imagine you have an itch right in the center of your back, which hand would you put back to scratch it? Okay, so just keep in mind that now it's a magical handshake of your hands and know which hand is holding the other and for me it's my right hand that's holding my hand now, if you don't think you do these behaviors constantly in the same way. way, look at this, okay, take your hands. complete, put them together without contractions, thumbs up, okay, now take them apart and place them upside down with the other hand on top, did you have to be careful?, okay, look at this, cross your arms, okay, do you know which ones are your arms up, it's good now. take it apart take it apart and do it the other way around and you thought you were left or right handed this is what I mean by lateralization you can sit down now thank you very much you see you have seen an object you see an object up there I would ask you to point at that object and keep your hand up there, so point to that object.

Well, first look at which hand you're aiming with and now close one, don't move it, close one eye and then close the other. He should have moved dramatically with one eye and not the other. The non-moving eye is your dominant eye again. A lateralized behavior. Now, when you came here this afternoon, you were either right-handed or left-handed, so I sincerely apologize for introducing another. gray area in their very complex lives, but I hope they have come away with the appreciation that they are not right or left handed, they are more or less left or right. Now I have one more activity for you that you would normally occupy yourself with. external eyes I am going to ask you to clap very loudly and observe what is above thank you very much