Left is best

I'm pretty sure that I've talked about this before, but it fascinates me so much that it's worth mentioning again. Since living in Sweden I've been amazed about how many left handed people I've met. Last week, for example, I was in a meeting where I noted that 12 out of the 15 people at the meeting were left handed. I was one of the 3 "odd" people present. It's not just a "one off" group of people. Since I spotted it the first time, I've been making note when with other groups, and the trend is the same. There appears to be an aweful lot of left handed Swedes.

Now, why is that ? I've got a couple of theories. Firstly, the simplest answer, is that it is genetic. Like the high numbers of people with blond hair in Sweden, maybe there's simply more with a dominant left hand gene. Maybe it's that simple. I then thought about particular professions. Growing up in New Zealand, the only people I remember seeing who were left handed were doctors. Not all doctors were left handed, but all the left handed people I knew were doctors. Certain brain types and certain personality types are drawn to particular professions, that is quite obvious. So I wondered if there was a link between those types and left handedness. Possibly. But, if that was the case, then why did I not have any left handed co-workers in NZ ? I'm still working in the same industry, just in a different country.

This got me to the final point of pondering. Maybe there are the same number of left handed people around the world as there are right handed people. Maybe the difference is the approach towards young people in different countries and how youngsters who are left handed are treated during those impressionable years. When I went through school, I didn't know one person who was left handed. Not a one. I guess that meant I didn't have any future doctors in my class. No real surprise there. Had a couple of colour blind people though, if that helped any.  And some pretty mean surfers. Gives you some idea of the calibre of my classmates and I guess, by default, me. So I'm wondering if it was a difference in attitude between the educational systems of the good old Empire, and Sweden. There must have been naturally left handed kids at school with me. I can't have gone 13 years and not met a single one. I'm left assuming that those kids had the "left handedness" trained (a nice word for beaten) out of them right back at the start. Growing up in an English system it was (and largely still is) all about conformity and uniformity. Sweden, from what I have seen, is very strong in protecting the rights of the individual to be who they are. Right from the start. Ok, they might have gone a bit too far down that road as I do believe that people need to learn how to work together in a better fashion than the average young Swede can today. I can imagine that a child raised in a Swedish system would really struggle in a confined and regimented English system, while an English raised child probably couldn't believe their luck when placed into a Swedish educational system.

I don't know if that last point is the main reason for the phenomenum or not, maybe it's a combination of all the theories. But it is kind of weird. Equally weird is the number of Swedes I've met who have allergies towards animals. I knew even less of those types of people in NZ than I knew left handed people. I'm pretty sure that has to be genetic, so maybe the whole lefty thing is as well. Who knows.