A left-right turn

Trying to give our oldest daughter an easy way to remember the difference between left and right, I suggested the classic “The right hand is the one you write with”. Fortunately - for both of us, really - this works fine in our case. Of course, it is not generally true. The world of handwriting is divided between righties and lefties.

It’s quite interesting, this handedness of the world.

Strangely, there are not as many left-handers as right handed ones among us. But it has been noted that many of societies high fliers are left handed. A highly unscientific survey (don’t tell them I did this!) of my colleagues suggests that this is correct. There are too many lefties for comfort. And they seem awfully clever, as well. Although... might be on dodgy ground trying to argue that the office is a particular peak performance environment.

Perhaps the competitiveness of the left has something to do with the division of the brain. The left half is supposed to deal with logic, numbers, science and reasoning. The right is in charge of art, poetry and the artistic side in general. Clearly, the left siders will be too shrewd for the dreamy right siders. No surprise if they end up on top.

The left-right division cuts right through society.

Politics is neatly (well, maybe not “neatly”) divided into left and right. It’s not clear to me if this has anything to do with the different sides of the brain. Suspect not. It is difficult to argue to that the idealistic socialists on the left, insisting on fairness and an equal division of many things, are driven by hard logic. Similarly tricky to insist that the free market capitalists on the right, with their eagerness for cut-throat competition and arbitrarily large banker’s bonuses, are guided by aesthetics. Somehow, the left-right labels almost seem to be the wrong way around...

In many countries people drive on the right. In others they stay on the left. Some countries have switched from left to right in living memory. Not sure if they did it the other way round somewhere. In some places, like India, the rules seem to be happily disregarded... and people drive all over the place.

Some languages are written from left to right. I find this confusing, but this must be because I am conditioned to things being the other way around. Reading your own language backwards is certainly weird (if you think not, look back at the red button short story from a couple of weeks ago). Although, playing around with it a bit (selecting phrases carefully and breaking up the words differently) you can end up with something that sounds like a real language. Admittedly a weird one, a bit like Welsh.

Nature is right and left handed at a much deeper level, as well.

The idea is that things can come in two sibling forms that are similar yet different. They are mirrored in the same way as the human hands. Hold your right hand up in front of a mirror and you see your reflection’s left hand. In typical scientific fashion, there is a fancy word for this: chirality (from the Greek word for hand).

Some molecules in chemistry and biology show this kind of symmetry. Others don’t, their reflection looks identical to the original.

So there you go, from a simple way to remember which hand you write with to one of the key “symmetries” in nature.

It really didn’t work, though.

My daughter still can’t tell the difference. She only says “Which hand do I write with, Daddy?”. She might just be cheeky or... maybe I lost her with that chirality business.