Lorin J. Elias - Side Effects: How Left-Brain Right-Brain Differences Shape Everyday Behaviour

Lorin J. Elias is an award-winning professor of psychology and vice-dean academic at the University of Saskatchewan. He completed his Ph.D. in behavioural neuroscience at the University of Waterloo and has been studying left-brain right-brain differences for over twenty-five years. His federally funded research program has resulted in over seventy research papers, appearing in journals such as Neurosurgery, Neuropsychologia, Cortex, Brain and Cognition, Laterality, Cognitive Brain Research, and Behavioural Neuroscience. These studies have been featured in articles in popular newspapers and magazines around the world, such as Cosmopolitan, Wired, Maxim, the New York Post, and the New Zealand Herald.Beyond his accomplishments in research, Dr. Elias is also a celebrated professor of psychology. He has won several teaching awards at the University of Saskatchewan, including the Master Teacher Award. Dr. Elias has earned a reputation for making seemingly complicated topics and esoteric material accessible, fascinating, and even fun. He has co-authored a college-level neuropsychology textbook and an adaptation of an introductory psychology textbook. Dr. Elias offers a variety of courses from introductory psychology up to graduate-level studies in cognitive neuroscience. He also writes for fun, including reviews of high-end audio equipment.

I drink coffee with my right hand, and I smoke with my left. But I talk with both hands.

GEORGE BURNS

T he most famous and obvious side effect of all is handedness. Our lopsided brains are plain to see through our universal, population-level preference for the right hand. Handedness is not a new discovery or a new development. It is even mentioned in ancient texts such as the Bible. But handedness somehow manages to be the most studied, yet most mysterious left-right difference of them all. Its the one lateral preference everyone has noticed, and even if you havent read one of the dozens of books devoted exclusively to handedness, I would guess that you have reflected on your own hand preferences at one point or another. Even a minor injury to the dominant hand serves as a cogent, even embarrassing reminder of how useless that otherhand can be.

For all these reasons, an analysis of handedness is both the best and the worst chapter to open our discussions of the lefts and rights of everyday life. But I dont really have a choice. As you will discover in every subsequent chapter, handedness influences, not causes but influences, most of the other lateral biases examined in this book. I couldnt escape the complicated and omnipresent impact of handedness when considering the other lateral preferences even if I wanted to. In keeping with the focus of all the other chapters, I will restrict my discussion of handedness to the everyday-life lens through which all the other lateral biases are portrayed.

What proportion of the population is right-handed? I can offer short and long answers. The short one is that approximately 90 percent of us are right-handed. But the long answer? The proportion depends on where someone is born. It depends on whenthe person was born. It depends on the culture and environment in which the person was raised. It depends on the sexual orientation of the person. It even depends on the developmental trajectory of the person and whether something might have gone awry during the birth process or even before. It depends on a persons gender. But it only depends so much