The lefties have long struggled in a right -hand world. But they are over-presented in an area: individual sports such as fencing and tennis. The conventional explanation for this is that the scarcity of lefties (about one person in ten) means that right -handed athletes are not familiar with them as opponents. But this can only be part of the story.
Tim Simon, from the University of Trento, Italy, a fencing fan, suspected that lefties enjoy some innate advantage in these sports, as well as their non-family. As he and his colleagues describe this week at the Royal Society Open Science, for some of them it turns out to be true.
To test his idea, Simon reasoned that if non-family was the only explanation for the advantage of lefties, then the difference should decrease at the highest levels of a sport, where players would be aware of left-handed tricks. If, however, some innate factor associated with the left -handed were a cause, then the difference could really increase. He therefore analyzed performance over more than a decade of the best athletes in the world in Badminton, table tennis, tennis and three types of fencing.
The result was that in the fencing of Florete and Sword and Table Tennis there was indeed an increase in lefties at the top. For example, 18% of the 200 best male sword fencers and 23% of the best men’s fencers were left -handed, but this rose to 28% and 31%, respectively, when only the top 100 were considered. The other three sports, however, did not show this effect.
The difference, I suspect Simon, is that the florete and sword involve thrust with small and quick movements. Table tennis requires similar dexterity. Saber fencing, in contrast, involves larger cutting movements, similar to employees in tennis and Badminton. He theorizes that this difference may be the reason why the lefties dominate in the first three sports, but not in others.
He proposes that the explanation may derive from the greatest dependence of the lefties of the brain’s right hemisphere compared to the distorters. The right hemisphere is more important than the left to process visual, spatial and temporal entrances, and generate motor responses. Although the benefits thus granted are probably small, they matter at the top – where to be a second fraction faster than an opponent separates victory from defeat. In Italian, the term for a left -handed is “sinister”. But there is nothing evil about his ability with a blade. Your neural connections are simply better.
From The Economist, translated by Marcos Guedes, published under license. The original article in English can be found at www.economist.com
