It's official: Left-handed people are smarter!

Talk about an ego boost for lefties!

From Aristotle and Mozart to Bill Gates and Barack Obama… left-handedness has always been associated with talent and intelligence. In fact, a recent study has proved – yet again – the link between a left-hand preference and heightened mathematical skills, which make left-handed people more likely to be geniuses, reported Indy100.

But what is a 'hand preference?’ It refers to the hand you use most for activities such as waving to eating. For example, if you write with your right hand but wave, shake hands or brush with your left, then you probably, actually, have a left-hand preference.

According to the study, those who have a left-hand preference have a more developed right-brain hemisphere. This helps in processing and understanding spatial awareness and mental representations of objects.

Also, left-handers also have a larger corpus callosum – the bundle of nerve cells connecting the two brain hemispheres – which suggests that "left-handers have an enhanced connectivity between the two hemispheres and hence, superior information processing."

IFL Science carried out experiments on 2,300 people of different ages. They asked them to complete the same questionnaire to assess their hand preference. The results showed that when "doing simple arithmetic, there was no difference between left and right-handers." However, when it came to difficult problem-solving, left-handers outperformed. Extreme right-handers under-performed in all the experiments. In conclusion, when it comes to complex mathematics, left-handers have a clear edge.

However, the study reminds us that hand preference does not just come down to which hand you write with, but the hand you use most for most activities. People who are right-handed writers with a strong left hand preference for other activities can have a similar brain structure to extreme left-handers and vice versa.

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