Are left-handers smarter?

Right-handers rejoice, handedness may affect intelligence.


Asked by: Praneeth Vitharana, Sri Lanka

The idea that left-handed people are more intelligent than right-handers is a myth.

There have been lefty geniuses in history like Leonardo da Vinci, but this is not part of a larger pattern. If anything, the opposite is true.

In 2015 Dutch researchers combined the results from over 30 previous studies involving over half a million people and found no link between handedness and verbal ability and a small advantage for right-handers in terms of spatial ability.

Another recent study based on data from tens of thousands of people actually found that left-handedness was more common among people with very low IQ than among people with typical IQ.

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