Brain Science Is Ignoring Left-Handed People
Shayla Love
Shayla Love
Quote:“It's been thought that it's just best to play it safe, be careful and exclude left-handers,” Bailey said. “That kind of mindset has become very deeply ingrained in cognitive neuroscience.”
When trying to figure out how the brain works, we need to account for all the ways a healthy brain can function, Karlsson said. Including left-handed people could actually help us learn more about the brain rather than mess up our efforts—like the ways the left and right side of the brain divide up the work, and the genetics that help to drive the brain’s asymmetries.
Left-handed people may not even have radically different brains for certain tasks. And there may be more variation in both left and right-handed people’s brains than we're aware of—the whole spectrum of lateral variation won't be revealed until we include lefties in brain research.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell