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TThe pantheon of artists and musicians is strewn with left-handers: Vincent Van Gogh, Jimi Hendrix, Emily Dickinson, David Bowie, Lady Gaga, to nam only a few. In popular imagination, the left -handed and creative genius have long been linked. In the scientific literature too.
This is due in part to the fact that the right hemisphere of the brain, which lights up with neural activity during creative thought in neuroimaging studies, tends to be dominant in left -handed individuals. Standard tests for creative problems of problems and generation of new ideas – a convergent and divergent thought – also seem to promote the left -hander, according to many studies.
But recently, scientists from Cornell University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong have reviewed a large number of scientific literature and found that this link between left -handers and creativity is probably a myth. The researchers sorted 1,000 relevant studies published since 1900, finally identifying 17 sufficient articles of rigor involving 10,000 participants, and found that left -handers are not better in creative thought than right -handers. In fact, they found that right -handers can even have a slight advantage.
“Creativity is difficult to define, like any other psychological construction,” writes Daniel Casasanto, in an email. “But we have analyzed the data of the [three] Tests that have been used most often for the psychological measure of creativity for decades. We have found that, according to this stallion-or, the left-handers are not more creative. Casasanto stressed that, while some older studies of small sample size had suggested an advantage of creativity among the advantages, when the studies were aggregated, the model disappeared.
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To determine if the left -handers dominate the creative professions, despite this relative disadvantage, the researchers reviewed 19 other studies. They found that even if left -handers are over -represented in the visual arts, creative writing and music, the model did not hold in other creative professions, including architecture, physics and mathematics. Instead, right-handers have proven to be over-represented in professions that would require the most creativity, according to the criteria of the United States Department of Labor, taken as a whole.
“Most of the professions that you consider as parade of” creative professions “do not show a over -representation of left -handers”, writes Casasanto. But “you can go wrong by thinking that there is a model if you focus on the few” creative “professions where the left -handers are over -represented.”
If you are a right, it may be time to give additional attention to your muse.
Lead image: Brazhyk / Shutterstock
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