14.6.07

KH FAQ (cont'd)

5) What hand do you write with?

I am a lefty. Surprised? The book 'Right-Hand, Left-Hand' establishes that left-handed people as a group have historically produced an above-average quota of high achievers (!).

Not only am I a lefty, but I use the 'hook' method of writing i.e. my wrist sits at the top of the page, and I write across it. The writing lines tends to flare up as I go along. Writing with fountain pens is a nuisance as I get ink stains on the side of my hand.

Lefty Trivia:

1) Wedding Rings- Early Egyptians believed that the vena amoris (love vein) ran from the third finger of the left-hand to the heart, and placing the wedding ring on this finger would provide a closer connection with one's heart

2) Seven US presidents were left handed (approx. 16%): James Garfield; Herbert Hoover; Harry S. Truman; Gerald Ford; Ronald Reagan; George H. W. Bush; Bill Clinton

3) Other famous lefty's:

  • Picasso
  • Amitabh Bachchan
  • Albert Einstein
  • Leonardo da Vinci
  • Julius Caesar
  • Kurt Cobain
  • Alexander the Great
  • David Bowie
  • Matthew Broderick (yaay Ferris!)
4) In 2006, researchers Johns Hopkins University found that left-handed men are 15% richer than right-handed men who attended college, and 26% richer if they graduated

5) My non-linear Smallville consumption can, also, be explained by being a lefty:

"Left-handed persons are thought to process information using a "visual simultaneous" method in which several threads can be processed simultaneously. Another way to view this is such: Suppose there were one thousand pieces of popcorn and one of them was colored pink. The right-handed person — using the linear sequential processing style — would look at the popcorn one at a time until they encountered the pink one. The left-handed person would spread out the pieces of popcorn and visually look at all of them to find the one that was pink. A side effect of these differing styles of processing is that right handed persons need to complete one task before they can start the next. Left-handed people, by contrast, are capable and comfortable switching between tasks. This seems to suggest that left-handed people have an excellent ability to multi-task, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there are more creative stems due to this ability to multi-task.

Right-handed people process information using "analysis", which is the method of solving a problem by breaking it down to its pieces and analyzing the pieces one at a time. By contrast, left-handed people process information using "synthesis", which is the method of solving a problem by looking at the whole and trying to use pattern-matching to solve the problem"
Synthesis! That's exactly it! I 'look' at the entire story visually and realize where I have gaps and make connections. Yaay synthesis!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

dude, you need to shave your hand.