The trainer was absolutely the least creative person I've ever met in my life and was obviously running from a script that they didn't understand or subscribe to. Perhaps she was filling in for a colleague?
For example, we were given a series of exercises to complete but the trainer seemed to think that there was only one way to complete each problem,. Here's an example (I'm sure you've heard it before - this was nearly 30 years ago):
'A woman lives on the 16th floor of a tower block. Every morning she presses the lift button for the ground floor and goes off to work. Then, every evening, she presses the button for the 6th floor, exits the lift and walks up the remaining 10 flights. Why does she do this every day?'
The answer, we were told, is that she's very short - the terminology of the time was 'a dwarf' - and can't reach any higher buttons than 5 or 6. But, as one student pointed out, how could we possibly have guessed this without knowing what the lift button panel looks like? What if it had been laid out differently? On some panels the 16 is only marginally higher than the 6.
Other three row panels have layouts where the 6 is actually higher than the 16.
Meanwhile, who's to say that the person doesn't voluntarily walk up 10 flights as part of a keep fit regime? Or maybe the buttons from 6 to 15 have been vandalised and don't work. And if the issue is height, why do they have to be a little person? Why not a wheelchair user? And why don't they simply use a stick?
The trainer started to get a bit flustered here, especially when one participant made the point that surely creativity is about encouraging free thinking and radicalism?
She therefore changed subject and launched into a whole spiel about ‘left brain/ right brain’ thinking, pointing to the fact that a lot of the world’s most creative people are left-handed, quoting Albert Einstein, David Bowie, Robert de Niro and others.
Now, I consider myself to be pretty creative and I’m right-handed. My best friend is an award-winning creative who designs commercials and advertising campaigns. He's right-handed too. In fact, almost everyone I know who's creative is right-handed. But is that simply because a larger proportion of the population is right-handed?
And is it true that left-handedness really does make you more creative?
I decided to try and find out.
It turns out that the idea comes from some studies conducted back in the 1960s and 1970s and the idea has simply persisted. However, modern ultrasound and CT scans have revealed a much more complex picture.
The largest modern study on handedness and creativity (that I've found to date) was conducted by Fleur E van der Feen and a team from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands in 2019. Their test group consisted of 20,539 participants, of whom 56% were left-handed. The research team used an online questionnaire to ask the participants to rate themselves with regard to creativity using a scale from 0 to 100. In line with the common belief that left-handers are more artistically inclined, left-handed participants judged themselves to be more artistically creative than right-handed participants. The study then asked participants how often they engaged in creative activities - anything from creating images, making music, writing and storytelling, plastic arts, and performing arts.
The result was that there was no difference between left-handers and right-handers regarding the actual amount of time spent on creative activities. Nevertheless, the researchers did find that individuals with a strong preference for using one hand for all activities (either the left or the right) spent more time on artistic activities than those with only a weak preference for either hand. Thus, as the academic paper says, 'greater specialisation of the hands was found in the artistically gifted, irrespective of whether they were more skilled with the left or with the right hand'.
Interesting, eh?
Left-handedness – or sinistrality if you like – appears in approximately 10% of the adult population worldwide and is more common in men. The term ‘sinistral’ comes from sinister, the Latin word for ‘left’. This word in turn derives from sinus, the Latin word for ‘pocket’ as, apparently, the Roman toga had a single pocket on the left side. The Latin for ‘right’ is dexter, from which we get words like 'dexterity'. No one is entirely sure why we are a predominantly right-handed species nor why we have preferred hendedness at all. After all, animals don't - not even our closest relatives, the great apes (and that whole 'all polar bears are left-handed' thing is an urban myth). However it may be because of something we can do that animals can't - talk.
The brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere helps control the operation of the right hand, eye, leg and so on and the right hemisphere controls the left. This is an efficient system as it allows a division of neurological labour - the two hemispheres can carry out different computations at the same time. For our remote ancestors it meant that the left brain could carry out routine operations like foraging for food, while the right brain kept an eye and ear out for predators. Most of our linguistic processing is done in the left hemisphere so it may be that as our left brain evolved for language, the preference for the right hand may have intensified simply as a side effect. This is called the Homo loquens hypothesis. But we'll probably never quite know what the sequence of events was that led our species to lean so overwhelmingly on the right sides of our bodies and the left sides of our brains.
Meanwhile, the left-handers have had a pretty rough time of it. Always on the lookout for the odd and the non-conformist, the Church once actively persecuted the Leftys. Left-handedness was seen as an indication of witchcraft or Satanic influence. It probably didn’t help that left-handedness, in comparison to the general population, also appears to occur more frequently in people with epilepsy, ADHD, dyslexia, Down's Syndrome and autism. The word 'sinister' unfortunately got to take on a new, and wholly undeserved, meaning.
Parents would force their children to become right-handed in order to make them conform. Even up until the early 20th century, schools would insist on left-handed children writing with their right hand (this happened to my mother - she's now ambidextrous as the result). And this isn’t solely a Western issue. The Inuit believed that left-handed people were sorcerers and, until relatively recently, a Japanese man could divorce his wife if she was left-handed.
But, as for the idea that Leftys are more creative ... the jury is still out.
Firstly, there is the issue that creativity is something difficult to both define & measure objectively. Who was the most creative member of The Beatles? McCartney is a Lefty, but Lennon was a Righty.
Secondly, using a few selected examples of left-handed creatives such as Pablo Picasso, Bill Gates and Matt Groening does not negate the fact that other brilliantly creative people are right-handed. The trainer on my creativity course used film directors James Cameron and Spike Lee as examples because they're left-handed. But Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are, or were, right-handed. Left-handed people do make up a smaller proportion of the population but is the percentage of film directors among them greater than the percentage of film directors among Rightys? It doesn't seem so. And the professions in which the percentage of left-handed people are highest are things like architects and lawyers rather than anything to do with the arts.
All of that said, the one thing that left-handers are absolutely brilliant at doing is adapting to life in a right-handed world. We build ramps for wheelchair users and put beeping noises in things to help people with sight issues. But almost nothing is done to accommodate the 10% of society who predominantly use their left hand. Don't think it's an issue? Just try using your left hand to do all the things you'd normally do with your right (if you're right-handed). Everyday things like door handles, can openers, potato peelers, mugs with designs on, ergonomic scissors etc. become annoyingly awkward to use. And you can tell that the Rightys invented our system of writing. Things would be so much easier if we all wrote vertically.
The point is this - Leftys have to constantly adapt and problem solve every minute of the day. That's got to make a person smarter and more creative - just out of pure necessity. Being able to function in a right-handed world might be inconvenient, but I suspect it might also be beneficial in the long run. It's interesting to note that left-handers are less likely to develop cognitive problems caused by things like Alzheimer's than right-handed people.
However, as I've often said before, if we put the same effort, time and money into working out and promoting what we all have in common instead of looking for the differences in people, we'd all be a lot happier. Being a Righty or a Lefty isn't some kind of competition and there's nothing productive to be gained by reinforcing stereotypes and creating divisions within society. We'd be better off finding ways to put everyone on an equal standing with the same opportunities available to all.
A creative person is the sum of their environment and life experience, just as a sporty person or a literary person or a political person is. Call me an old hippy if you like but perhaps we should concentrate on the skill, the passion and the ability of creative people rather than attributing their output to what hand they prefer to use?
And perhaps we should employ creative people to teach corporate creative thinking courses?
Just a thought.
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