Sunday Scribblings #26 – Left and Right

Throw salt over your left shoulder and you’ll hit the devil.
Don’t expect it to work if you use your right shoulder – the devil stands to your left.

Southpaw.
I am right because I’m left.
Left handed people are the only ones in their right minds.

If I have a left hemisphere stroke, will I lose my language?
Or will it be preserved?
I worry about having aphasia (an acquired neurological language disorder).
How would anyone test a Speech-Language Pathologist with aphasia who knows all the tests for aphasia?

I’m hoping I have bilateral language representation.
Then I won’t have to worry about stuff like that.
They say that 50% of left-handers do.

I’m left handed, but right footed.
I kick with my right foot in soccer.
Yet, I step up and down stairs with my left foot first.
So am I really right footed?
I shoot right in hockey, I thread a needle with my left hand, I use a right-handed mouse.
I prefer to sleep on my right side, and I have a lot of left handed friends.

My dominance seems to run along a continuum.
I grew up in a left-hand-dominant household.
I have a left handed mom and a left handed twin sister.
I think I just wanted to “fit in”, so I became left handed too.

Annie Lennox
Hans Christian Anderson*
Leonardo DaVinci
Jimi Hendrix*
Helen Keller
Matt Groening
Michaelangelo
Edvard Munsch*
Lewis Carroll
Marie Curie
Carol Burnett
Jim Hensen

All left handed, some have bipolar disorder too (just like me). Coincidence?

Geneticist Amar Klar, Ph.D., at the National Cancer Institute, developed a theory based on yeast research. YEAST research? Hmmm…

Amar that suggests that people who are “non-right-handed” (so, left handed or ambidextrous), have a threefold higher prevalence of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Some studies of families with several members who have either schizophrenia or bipolar disease suggest abnormalities related to hemisphere asymmetry. In particular, the affected family members with psychoses seem to have brain hemispheres that are more symmetrical in terms of their functioning, with language processes present in both hemispheres.

That was pretty tangential, but factual.
But see, maybe I do have language in both my left and right cerebral hemispheres.
Whew…I’m relieved.

I feel so scatter-brained. Never mind left or right brained.