Handedness and Creativity

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Remember -- look at general instructions, too, for status report, poster, final report.

Examples from students

Theory and Background:

Describe the differences found between right brain and left brain functions, including big a difference they are.  Describe how those differences are related to right and left handedness.  Again, how large are those differences proposed to be?  In order to explain your hypothesis, how are those functions used in the measure you are looking at? (e.g. in a job, in a math problem)  Describe the role of the corpus callosum.  One of the big questions to ponder is: What is creativity?  What different skills make up creativity?

One way to do Procedure:

Step A. Decide on a question you are interested in in terms of brain lateralization (left vs. right brain functions). The most common statement is: "People using their right brain are more creative."

Step B. Measure left vs. right brain use by a couple of measures: handedness, footedness, eye dominance. How will you deal with people who do some things with one hand and some things with other? Notice the definition of ambidextrious for ice skaters below.

Determine how you will measure creativity (or other left/right brain functions, such as facial recognition, spatial orientation, computations). You can measure creativity as it relates to jobs; then you have to determine, BEFORE YOU SEEK YOUR SUBJECTS, where jobs fall on a creativity scale.

Step C. Ask 20 people about their jobs and their handedness.

Step D. Match the people's jobs to the scale. You should come up with a score for each person (in the example below, if Fred were a nurse, he would have a score of 2. Is the average score of the left handed people higher or lower than the right handed?

I have some creativity tests you could use if you want to test it directly.  Also look at example reports, some good examples of different tests there.

For Status Report:

In part 2, list data in table like one below. Also, state what your definition of handedness is and a scale for jobs (if you use jobs) like the one below. Explain how you came up with scale -- how did you figure out what crativity is?

Example of a scale:

SCALE

Most Creative       5          Artist  what other professions?                    
                    4          Architect                   
                    3          Doctor                      
                    2          Nurse                       
Least Creative      1          Truck Driver                

EXAMPLE DATA

Thought Questions:

What does creative mean? How many different ways are there to measure creativity?

What makes something creative?  

  a brain storm from one class gave the following:  TO BE ADDED

Think about implications of doing things step-by-step vs. all-at-once: how would they look at a picture differently, or experiencing ideas in a different order?  How about when looking to buy a new car?

Relate to top down vs. bottom up processing.

Extra Resources:

I have some information on other tests for creativity.

One segment from "The Brain" videotape series.  On reserve in library.

Textbook's CD Rom has a good piece.

http://duke.usask.ca/~elias/left/causes.htm briefly discusses many theories for handedness. Which one(s) support a difference in creativity? Note what other abilities are correlated with handedness in each theory. Able to measure any of them?

Here's some interesting information and a book to look for:

According to Coren (1993):

"In a study that tested 5,147 people for sidedness, we found that 88 percent of the people were right-handed and 81 percent were right-footed. This means that although humans have a right-sided bias for their foot use, the tendency is not quite as strong as it is for handedness. It is also the case that a right-hander exhibits a strong tendency to be right-footed as well. Of our group, 84 percent had their dominant hand and dominant foot on the same side." (p. 29)

The study in which this information can be found is Porac & Coren (1981).

References

Coren, S. (1993) The Left-hander syndrome: The causes and consequences of left-handedness. New York: Vintage.

Porac, & Coren, S. (1981). Lateral preferences and human behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.

"Like handedness, eyedness is mostly a right-sided matter in human beings. Our survey showed that 71 percent of the population is right-eyed. Also, 74 percent of human beings have their dominant hand and their dominant eye on the same side...." (p. 30) The idea that eyedness is important for the direction of spin is supported by the following observation: "Judgements of direction are also affected by eyedness. When asked to locate a position in space that they think is 'straight ahead' of them, people tend to pick a position shifted toward the side of their dominant eye. The visual system seems to interpret 'straight ahead' to mean 'straight ahead of your dominant eye'." (p. 31)

Ambidexterity The term "Ambidexterity" describes individuals who are equally capable of performing tasks with the right or left side of their bodies. While very few skaters perform jumps in both directions, there have been some who spin in both directions. However, footwork should include turns in both directions, which contributes to the difficulty of the sequence. The Ice Skating Institute of America (ISIA) requires participants to jump in both directions to pass advanced tests.

Last Modified: January 29, 2000

Tom Link

 tlink@pierce.ctc.edu