Left-Finned Fish and Right-Eyed Chickens

Sometimes being left-handed can be an advantage. Because only one in ten is left-handed, southpaw boxers, portside baseball pitchers, and screw-arm politicians are often difficult to deal with. One-half of the progeny of left-handed parents will be southpaws. Why people turn out to be left-handed is still a genetic mystery. That is, if it is genetic. I’m the only left-hander in a family of nine, so we just about make the one-in-ten rule.

Among other handicaps too numerous to mention, I’m sort of an ambidextrous mess. I throw left-handed, kick right-handed, bat right-handed, dribble a basketball better with the right-hand, pick my nose almost exclusively left-handed, hold a dry martini with my right hand while filching shrimp, cheese, and crackers with my left, and would love to have a left-handed chainsaw. Only the brain knows why.

Ninety percent of the world and its machines is built for right-handers, so most really dumb left-handers don’t make it beyond the age of five. I must point out that five of our last seven presidents have been left-handed: Jerry Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush (41), Slick Willie Clinton, and now Barack Obama. It’s a good thing George W. Bush (Lurch) is right-handed. He would have never made it to five as a left-hander. Lyndon Baines Johnson always claimed Jerry Ford had played too many football games without a helmet for the University of Michigan, but Ford was actually a pretty good student. Perhaps pardoning Tricky-Dick Nixon was a “genius” move.

I wonder what our country would be like if all seven of our last presidents had been right-handed. It would make a good brain study. Researchers have determined that one out of three early American Indians were left-handed. What’s going on anyway?

By the way, LBJ may have been right about Ford. Ford is only left-handed when writing and sitting down. Ford throws a ball with his right, plays golf right-handed, and writes on a blackboard with his right. He was also accident-prone. Maybe Ford did have too many concussions.

Portside Gorillas and Left-Winged Bees

Handedness is prevalent throughout the animal and plant world. Most vines “twine” to the right, but honeysuckle invariably twines to the left. In the animal world most are right-handed, but the left arm of gorillas is larger and heavier than the right, so a strong majority of them are left-handed.

Doing things more with one side of the body than the other is called “lateralization” in biology. We don’t know enough about the brain yet to figure out why and how. We have only known for a couple of centuries that thousands of species, including toads, mice, rats, marmosets, cats, chickens, and all wild animals are either left-clawed, left-hoofed, or left-pawed. Fish are right or left-finned.

For some reason swimming favors left-handers because neurologists have determined they see better under water! Mark Spitz, winner of seven Olympic Gold Medals is left-handed. I couldn’t find out for sure, but the evidence indicates Michael Phelps, our latest Olympic hero with eight Gold Medals, was caught lighting his pot bong with his left hand while holding it with his right. This definitely suggests he is left-handed. Perhaps a pothead can correct me.

A Netherlands biology professor conducting left-eye, right-eye research in chickens has determined that which eye is exposed to light while in the incubator will reveal whether the chicken is better at identifying food and prey or detecting predators and sexual advances. This can be important to chicken growers, I guess. The left side of the chicken’s brain controls the right eye while the right side of the brains controls the left eye. Geez, life is complicated.

Three Pounds of Grey Stuff

The skull contains about three pounds of brains in two halves after it reaches full size at the age of six. This fleshy computer is only two percent of the body’s weight but it gets 20 percent of the blood flow and 20 percent of the oxygen supply. Brain cells cannot function without oxygen after three to five minutes so they begin to die. And somewhere in the brain something determines whether we will be right or left-handed. The two hemispheres are “bilaterally symmetrical” according to biologists. The left hemisphere primarily deals with the production and comprehension of language. Neural wiring is slightly different in lefties so maybe this “section” determines “handedness.”

But it is extremely difficult to figure out where this might take place–and what causes it. One thimbleful of brain tissue harbors 50 million neurons, several hundred miles of axons (the wiring that carries signals from neurons), and perhaps a trillion synapses, the connections between neurons. These connection form and break throughout life, so the brain in its entire life can store more than the capacity of the brain.

The brain is made up of a thousand thimblefuls of neurons and axons which can store a petabyte of information. A petabyte contains one quadrillion bytes, or 1,000 terabytes, or 1,000,000 gigabytes. A byte is 8 bits of data. All the information on the Internet can be stored in three petabytes, so three human brains could contain everything on the Internet. Enough of that.

Computer developers guess that a single computer capable of storing what is in the human brain (a petabyte) will be available within 15 to 20 years. The problem will be power. If we use the same power it takes to run a computer chip today, that “petabyte” computer will use the same power it takes to run Washington D.C. today. Our brain now uses about 12 watts, or less than a refrigerator light or one-half of a laptop. Our kids sure have a lot of interesting problems to work on.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil says machines will be able to outthink humans in a few decades. Another futurist, Davis Linden, says “Wait a minute.” He says making a computer is relatively simple compared to making a brain. Computers can be made in stages. But making something equal to the human brain “will be like making a modern car by adding parts to a 1925 Model T that never stops running.” Linden says brains differ from computers in many ways, particularly from their highly efficient energy use to their tremendous adaptability.

Idiot Savants Certainly Are Not Idiotic

Some brains today are highly adaptable. Kim Peek, otherwise known as the “Rain Man,” died in December. Kim had several unusual talents, although he never reached the point where he could button his shirt or tie his shoes. Kim was born with damage to the cerebellum. Bundles of nerves which connect the two hemispheres are missing, but he was able to memorize whole books at 16 to 20 months. As an adult he could read a book in about an hour, remembering almost everything he read. He enjoyed history, literature, geography, all sports, and everything to do with numbers.

Kim had a most unusual reading technique. He read the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye, spending only 8-10 seconds per page. Somehow his brain put the two separate tracks from his reading into one central siding. He claimed he had memorized the contents of 12,000 books and was often challenged to recall parts of them. He hardly ever lost, although he scored a below average 73 on general IQ tests.

Kim could remember music he had heard as a child and play it on the piano to some degree. Because of the damage to his cerebellum his motor skills were quite limited. After his character was explored in the movie “Rain Man,” starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, he made many public appearances with his father. He was terrific at calendar calculations. He would ask audience members for their birthday date–and then tell them on which day they were born and what major item was printed in newspaper headlines that day.

A study made in 2008, a year before he died, indicated that he probably had FG Syndrome, a rare genetic syndrome linked to the X chromosome. The syndrome often causes very low muscle tone and abnormally large heads. Kim had both.

Readers might enjoy reading about another savant with very unusual skills. Daniel Tammet speaks several languages and is working on developing his own. But ever since he suffered an epileptic seizure at the age of three Daniel has been obsessed with numbers.

He cannot drive a car, tell right from left, or perform a simple task such as wiring an electrical plug, but at age 31 he can figure out square roots faster than a calculator and he can recall pi (remember 3.1416…?) To 22,514 decimal places. Tammet can take two three-digit numbers, multiply them, and come up with the answer instantly. He is of tremendous interest to scientists because he can partially explore his thinking while he is coming up with numbers. As an example, he sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures and somehow these teasers help him to come up with instant answers.

Scientists talk about “brain damage” suffered by savants and those who have unusual skills. We still have very little idea what happens to the brain when a human is so talented and “different.” Tammet cannot go to the beach near his home because the beach is covered with pebbles. He would go “crazy” counting them.

Studying the Brain, Slice by Slide

Sometime in the future, if we have one, we might get answers to petabyte brains, brain damage, savants, and even “handedness.” There are a number of “brain” projects in our major universities. Many of them will be using the brain of Henry Molaison, a victim of amnesia, who had participated in hundreds of studies about memory. He died last year at 82. He donated his brain to science years ago.

The University of California at San Diego is currently slicing up his brain so many projects can study it. Technicians devised a slicer, much like an electric meat slicer, to cut off very thin slices of the brain from top to bottom. Thousands watched the slicing by Webcast because many of them will share in the slices that are a paper-thin 70 microns each. With advanced computer technology the scientists are able to make accurate reproductions of the slices. Molaison’s brain will be the first Google Earthlike search engine which anyone can study by turning a computer.

There are about 50 brain banks in the world, some containing hundreds of brains possessing neurological or psychiatric problems. Dr. Paul Ivan Yakovlev has slices from hundreds of brains stored at a facility in Washington.

The slicing of Molaison’s brain took 53 hours. The lab is now preparing to mount slices on individual glass slides. Each will be stained to sharpen the features of the slice. We already know there are significant anatomical differences between male and female brains. It will be interesting to see if there are any other differences. Perhaps we will also be able to discover where “handedness” happens in the brain, thus perhaps solving other problems.

Left-handed people are more likely to die from accidents because we live in a right-handed world. We are most likely to have more neurological, immunological, or pyschiatric diseases. Could left-handedness be the result of some kind of damage in the womb or birth trauma? Why do lefties survive? A reputable study of eight traditional societies conducted at the Université Montpellier II, in France, indicates that southpaws do better in fights, thus having better survivability. We lefties are quick to say that we are not more violent than right-handers. We just fight better.

We are also more rare. A few sea shells curve to the left instead of the right. They are highly prized by collectors. Some lobsters are left-handed–but only because the right claw has been lost in a fight. All medieval suits of metal armor were made for right-handers. The lance support was on the right side and a shoulder skirt protected the left shoulder because it wasn’t the “sword side.”

For some reason—brain, genetic, or happenstance—there are more left-handed boys than left-handed girls. Okay, okay. No smart remarks.

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