They are the one's who had a hunger that was never satisfied, whose thirsts were never slaked, and who never stopped until in tears, they lamented of no more new worlds to conquer. They are the left handers who conquered the world!
Only seven percent of the population, yet a constant source of speculation, myth, and irony. Look into their past and you can tell evolutionary tales of a special breed of novelty seekers, trouble makers who mercifully and perhaps thankfully are few in numbers. Construct your statistics just so, and you discover that they carry a spark of genius, an impatient temperament, a talent for trouble, and a penchant for dying young. Look to the future and they will become the hope and bane of society, discoverers and destroyers of worlds.
Are these tall tales, just so stories to entertain the young and naive? Sure. But does understanding how things had to be and how they may be tell us much about how they really are? Not really.
Consider an automobile. Knowing the general picture of how cars evolved and how they may be used in the future does not ultimately tell us much about cars. To do that, you have to take them apart and see how they work. And whether it is a left handed drive or having to drive left handed, the devil, as well as the explanation is in the details.
It's all a matter or organization, or axons really, the long extensions of brain cells that criss-cross the cortex of the brain like Amazonian vines. The brain has two frontal cortices, lobes of gray matter above your eyes. The left is for settled knowledge, the immutable facts of life learned since childhood. The right is for transient stuff, new and tentative knowledge. The memorable stuff eventually transfers to the left hemisphere whre it becomes fixed in memory, like an heirloom of experience. The rest fades, and is forgotten as new experience interferes with and obliterates the old. Woven with the processes of memory is the incentive of value embedded in the things you remember. That is where those axons come in. The metaphors and pictures that comprise our perceptions are caused by the activation of arrays of brain cells or neurons, and they are orchestrated to fire by neurochemicals that bubble from these axons like dew on a blade of grass. These neurochemicals, or neuromodulators (e.g. dopamine) are in turn elicited by the memory and perception of novel and important things. It is a marvelous and strange loop of self organization that engages brain and body, and makes for consciousness, memory, and life itself.
It also makes for left handers.
Neurally, handedness is a specialized thing. For right handers, the left frontal cortex controls, and for left handers, the right. It's all a hardwired and heritable thing, and for the settled knowledge of handedness, the left hemisphere is up for the job. For left handers, its rather of an imposition. The right hemisphere is like your dizzy aunt, always troubling to make sure that her hat is on right, or where she left her keys. To accomodate these new demands the right hemisphere accomodates the best way it can. It makes room for new receptors for the neuromodulators that spur our curiousity. In other words, to be left handed is to be more inclined to seek novel and interesting things. Whether advantage or handicap, to be left handed means to physically change the structure of your brain, and in turn to become a greater seeker of novelty, and perhaps by implication a conqueror of new worlds.
Whether left handers are destined to conquer the universe, die untimely deaths, be geniuses or cranks no one can say. And whether they were selected by evolution to give a creative spark to humanity, a counterweight to dull thinking is impossible to prove. Statistical inferences can after all be used to prove the earth square, and the selective processes of evolution are faded in rock, and are speculation at best.
It's all unknown really, and we should leave it like that. But we won't. Think of that when you by chance see someone scribbling avidly with a different hand than yours, and marvel at the possibility and destiny of a different breed of humanity.
