Guess what I have in common with Barack Obama?

We're both left-handed!

Since WWII there have been 6 left-handed presidents:

Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush., Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.

“Generally speaking, left-handers have more of a symmetrically distributed brain and right-handers are more asymmetric,” he says. “For right-handers, language is on the left side, for left-handers it’s more likely to be on both sides, or on the right side. The thought is that this has given rise to a different way of thinking, a different cognitive style. Maybe this difference provides lefties with a social advantage.”

As for our new president, he joins a slew of celebrated lefty leaders, movers and shakers including Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Henry Ford, Helen Keller and Mahatma Gandhi, prompting at least one right-handed researcher to wonder whether there may just be a left-hand path to greatness.

“It is an interesting question as to why left-handedness has stayed around,” says Geschwind. “If it didn’t give us some advantage, it would have been wiped out. But it’s been around for as long as recorded time. You see it even in cave drawings. It might be interesting to develop a scale that looked at social cognition and leadership abilities and then look at handedness to see if lefties are better at social tasks.”

Always proud to be a south-paw!