Body + Brain


Giving Creativity a Hand

Scorn and superstition have plagued left-handed people for centuries. In some parts of Scotland, it’s considered a bad omen to encounter a “corrie-fisted” (left-handed) person at the start of a long journey. And the Meru people of Kenya believed that their religious leader’s left hand had unspeakable powers.

Maria Konnikova wrote for Elements in The New Yorker yesterday about the historically unflattering picture of left-handedness. She leads with criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who in 1903 asserted that left-handers were more than three times as prevalent in criminal communities than in “normal” populations. Prejudice of this and other kinds abated only in the last two decades, when science proved that left-handness does not correspond to a laundry list of mental and physical ailments, as previously thought. In fact, left-handers might be better off cognitively, according to a recent study. Konnikova writes:

This spring, a group of psychiatrists from the University of Athens invited a hundred university students and graduates—half left-handed and half right—to complete two tests of cognitive ability. In the Trail Making Test, participants had to find a path through a batch of circles as quickly as possible. In the hard version of the test, the circles contain numbers and letters, and participants must move in ascending order while alternating between the two as fast as possible. In the second test, Letter-Number Sequencing, participants hear a group of numbers and letters and must then repeat the whole group, but with numbers in ascending order and letters organized alphabetically. Lefties performed better on both the complex version of the T.M.T.—demonstrating faster and more accurate spatial skills, along with strong executive control and mental flexibility—and on the L.N.S., demonstrating enhanced working memory. And the more intensely they preferred their left hand for tasks, the stronger the effect.

These skills relate to a specific kind of creativity called “divergent thinking,” or—as Konnikova puts it—”the ability to generate new ideas from a single principle quickly and effectively.”

Using your non-dominant hand can boost creativity.

Such cognitive flexibility might stem from a more functional flexibility. In other words, your first-grade art teacher might have done you a favor by forcing you to use that right-handed pair of scissors:


Not surprisingly, then, a handful of scientists have shown that we recruit structures from both sides of the brain when we’re being creative. Here’s Scott Barry Kaufman writing for Beautiful Minds at Scientific American:


Read Kaufman’s post for more information on these networks, and check out our brain interactive to learn more.