The gene that likely makes people left-handed may slightly raise the risk of developing psychotic mental illnesses, according to an international study.

Led by the Wellcome Trust for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, the study involves a team of 40 scientists from 20 research centres across the world, and was published online Tuesday in the scientific journal Molecular Psychiatry.

"This is the first potential genetic influence on human handedness to be identified, and the first putative genetic effect on variability in human brain asymmetry," said an abstract on the study.

The scientists said that little is known about the gene LRRTM1, but they suspect that it modifies symmetry in the human brain. Asymmetry is important, since the left side of the brain usually controls speech and language and the right side controls emotion. With left-handers this pattern is often reversed.

lefty

hhhmmm...that explains it. My ex is a lefty. LOL

I disagree..... Where's my axe??? die die die *sucks thumb and bounces of padded wall*

Gee...Are you a lefty? LOL

I am not mentally ill. Yes you are. Who said that? No really this stuff is really dumb dont they have better things to do then spend millons of dollors on this kind of stuff.

No I am not a lefty.... I am a lefty.... Tsk.... Why is it so hard to follow? *dribble*

LOL, you guys are funny. I am ambidextrous, so what does that say about me?

eeeewwwwww-aaaaawwww eeeeeeeewwwwwwww-aaaaawwwwwwww I'm a fire engine (not a donkey)...

I am left handed right? Not right, right? Definately left, right.

I am ambidexterous too...... I can't use either hand..... *wibble*

I always knew there was something different about the lefties

Using your left hand is a gene now?

I was a left handed kid, then my dad taught me to use my right hand instead.

...No wonder my writing is like a chicken with ink on it's claws ran across my page.

Besides that, left handedness is also linked to geniality. I'm right handed....

glorybebe I guess you are doomed Just hidding.

LOL, it's very possible!

Oops that should say kidding. I'm a dork.

LOL, I knew what you meant, it's all good.

I write left handed, play guitar right handed, when playing cricket i bat right handed, bowl left handed. I"ve never really decided which hands the knife n fork are comfortable in. HELLLLPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!

I suffer from Manic Depression.

As i understand it (which doesnt mean much), the left side of the brain controls the right body & deals with the day to day basics of life. The right side of the brain is controls the left body & deals with trippy stuff, daydreams, song writing & generally creative/destructive stuff.

Lefties use more of the right brain & less of the left brain.

Well,thats about all i know.
NO, you know nothing.
Yes i do.
No you dont..............................oh, here we go again..............another night of arguing with ME & losing the argument !

What a ridiculous research to do! I wonder if they ever considered that a left-handed person's brain is just reverse so instead of the left side of the brain usually controlling speech and language and the right side controlling emotion, it is just the other way around not through any potential mental illness but because the brain is just different - rather like different colour skin.


You are a gonna

Just kidding x

Actually, about ten years ago there was a study that found 75% of men who were left handed were gay. Whether it was true or not, who cares, but boy did I bug my boss and two co-workers, they were all lefties.

im gglad im right handed or id still be in the psycheward

Oh jeeze.. so my father in law really could be a psychotic serial killer! Alright, new plan! Cut off his left hand, force him to go right, right!!??

Well, I'm lefty-- when I'm diagnosed you guys be first to know... :/

LOL. It's funny (weird) that they 'discovered' this when they used to say that left handedness was a sign of the Devil.

Mental illness, satanic worship and homosexuality here i come!

LMAO!

They have to have an excuse for everything, don't they?

What about is a person is left-legged?

On a more serious note, I remember when I was about five years old, in school eating their horrible dinners and eating left-handed (even though I am right-handed), the teacher would take the knife and fork out of my hands and reverse them. That used to annoy me, it is a wonder I did not end up w-w-w-w-w-w-with a s-s-s-s-s-s-stutter!!

I think that was so mean! They did that to my aunt in school as well and she wasn,t allowed to write with her left hand,so she had to force herself to write with her right hand and developed the most unreadable writing ever! Her writing looks worse than a doctors, and no one can read one word they write except the pharmacist and even they get it wrong a lot! Thats why they say you should always double check your prescriptions, apparently they want to stop hand written prescriptions all togeather because of all the mistakes made by pharmacists who have given the wrong meds and/or dosages and many people have died or become horribly ill because of that!

Well where have you people been,?.. ah yes my weird little members it is Abecrombie
Those of you who know me well know Im a lefty , and those of you who know me know Im nut case.
That is interesting , I wonder how many research survey panelists were right handed , no... I mean the scientists were right handed that post up the new and ever changing news on the handedness phenomenon.?

First , the minority was small so different was obvious , if it seem natual for one out of 200 or more lets say to write with ther left hand then thats the hand they are supposed to use, but there was something very unique about that,... either this child had other abilities or intelligence that was destined by the maker of all human being productss. how ever we were manafactured the lefties were stamped during the packaging procedure before earth was ready we were a twinkle in the eye of energy intelligent energy , I f every human fingerprint is completely different from one another and science and medical research are finding that there are trillions of more brain cells then there are stars in the sky,.. whoo we that must tell us something . the majority of the world today is pretty messed up in my opinion and being twice exception might be why i feel the need to emphasize in this due to my gifts of artistic abilities from kindergarden on , until highschool i was always the best drawer in the class. it was a talent i was a natural at. my strength. i knew it meant something. i was warned when going into high there might be some cometition due to the large amount of students. I was not the best in the whole school but i always had a a grade easy . i learned that elemntry school housed contained me ] me hours each day in special ed from 1stgrade to the 6th .Regular school time with the whole class ,.. my 3rd teacher took masking tape and walked over to my desk everyone looked my way, seing the teacher just tear a long * bleep* [donkey butt] piece of masking tape , 12 inches or more long and you know the sound of that sounds scary when your in the third grade , i just flashed back, right now, no shoot, I THOUGHT SOMETHING WAS BROKEN ON OR AROUND MY DESK AND SHE WAS TAPING IT UP FOR ME THEN,.. omg,.. grabbing my paper ripped it right out of my hand and , well i was righting completly upside down left handed,.. but she taped iit right sidde up wwith out tilting it like a little even , no , mine was stright up and i couldnt write for shish ka bob, as i peered around and the rest of the group of classmates, theres were slanted a little. but me not .
any way its great to be back and oh,.. then demons were the thought of the small group of people , there scared, then it was creative people , now it mental frillen fry joe illness.

i kid you not ive experienced all three,.. in my life so it mustcollaborate with left handers ,... who are born with the talent to draw well with that hand,.. must have been looked at as withces ,.. back then in slaems day,.. becuse that would have been like a sci f movie to those paranoid stiff fearfull people niave they were or cruel there of been a feeling of different setting you aside for that ability if talented or creative and that will seperate you not by choice in likfe but by the majority not having a clear undersatndi g and some had madness which is possession or mental illness the devil made me do it and usualy with a inabilty to do certain academical problems in school with numbers or not remain on the same flow as every one else might conclude that the emotional intelligence is there creative gifts abilities that are the few rare ingredients societies need to survive . but mankind like to control the process and try to change what is different or try to fix something that isnt broken but it is a threat when mankind has a freewill to choose to take action , manipulate and so forth to provoke fear in others. the emotial intelligence is difficult a nd usual even if they are right handed the gifted , learning disabled person righthanded can still have emotional intellenge which might cause a inability to cope well with society and therefore develops mental health issues,

if we are not excepted , my fellow members and weird ones that are genius people , all wacky and wild when the board here tells me i have to pick my nose with my right wee wee toe [ pinky] then its pinatta party time in the ol funny farm . lol i was distracted see im proof that it is all good so go back to sleep before i keep typing im so tired of brainstorming . and farting .lol

what elese does the brain do, oh it thinks about .... you know... hehetee cause when no body want us lefties around we have no one to pick us out normaly to mate were shunned , but we will live FOERVER !!! must go im approching 40 in six days another freaky thing that goes along with flatliners. mama yes its permanet im gone .. tiredness is dangerous at my age ,.. by the way im apedexria too. and i still write upside down , lolleft handed.

Well the lefties do seem a bit ................ but so am I

I'm the only lefty in my close family of 3. I can safely say that I am the most emotionally stable of us, and possibly mentally stable as well.
Then again... I'm also the only male of the three. That could have something to do with it!
Hahah, kidding... (about that last part)

I"m left-legged cuz if i play football (soccer) & take a penalty or free-kick, i naturally kick with my left foot.

I had that school dinner experience myself.

I"ve heard that polar-bears are left handed (left-pawed?). If one went mad, would it be a Bi-polar bear ?

I always thought that doctors wrote in Latin ?

I"m not gay, but my boyfriend is !!!!
Just kidding.

I used to be a licensed Rx technician (about a million years ago) and they do write in a type of shorthand latin, that's why it looks like chicken scratch. For example "ii t bid" - take two tablets twice a day. The hard part is when the docs forget their Latin and write the wrong instructions. Most pharmacists are pretty good at catching it though.

I seem to be amphibious, I mean, ambidextreous mostly... I eat with my right hand, have no preference for writing (although tend to stick with the right because I like spiral bound notepads and the spirals get in the way if I go left), I only iron left-handed, I use right handed scissors. I golf cross handed which really annoys the heck out of my boyfriend. haha. (a right handed club with a cross left handed grip)

I am however goofyfooted. I am absolutely without a doubt left footed. No question.

I'll let you know if I develop any mental conditions beyond the obvious. haha.

I really do think there can be something with left handedness and brains, I'm left handed but my parents taught me to write with my right hand. I've got the impression that it made me more creative and imaginative, to train the part of the brain I wasn't supposed to train so much. I'm living in my own world, always looking at a weird side of it. I really think my temper and my love for abstraction is related to my unaccepted left handedness.

If you want your son or girl to be an artist, make them write with left hand if their right handed and with their right hand if they're left handed. Maybe it's something scientists should look into, the brain development in both case.

Mental illness is simply another term to say that we don't think like other people, it can sound bad but it can means good too.

" I've got the impression that it made me more creative and imaginative,".

Yeah, bang on.
I"ve got the left-handed affliction & i keep writing poetry & songs.
I dont have to try to hard, they"re "just there". I can be doing the most mundane of tasks & a poem or melody will just be in my mind. I ain"t talking about "the last tune ya heard on the radio", but totally NEW ORIGINAL music.
Yeah. Left-handed means CREATIVE , even a bit off the wall. But , getting back to the thread, i also think it means ,Mental Illness.
Even if its just a little bit like OCD.(i could start another thread about OCD).

ft Le ft
Le ft Le
ft Le ft
Le ft Le
ft ft Le Le ft ft
Le Le ft ft Le Le
ft ft Le Le ft ft
LeftLe ft Left LeftLe

Well, i spent ages doing that!!!!!
It spelled 666 , spelled out by the word LEFT.
It did"nt work, did it ?

It's super interesting what happens to the brain sometimes.

I have a girlfriend who I've known since I was ummm.... 8yo I guess. She was always the brilliant one in our group. She graduated from college with a 4.0 (while drinking a case of beer every night... party animal) and she never had to work for it. She was really into statistics, math and business. She graduated with a degree in Finance.

2 years after college she had a MASSIVE stroke, that almost killed her, today she's still paralysed on her left side. She was in the hospital for nearly a year, and when she was finally released, she ended up going back for her MBA but really struggled. She did get it, but all the sudden the math and logic that was as natural as breathing to her before the stroke, made very little sense to her.

Today she works from home, doing small accounting tasks and books for non-profits, she's got a nice little business going. BUT, what was MOST fascinating, is that all the sudden, she's an AMAZING artist. She paints watercolors that could make you cry. Prior to the damage to her brain... she'd have been utterly confused if you'd asked her to draw a picture of a flower, even as a doodle.

Totally weird... the change to her personality was so profound that I can honestly say.... she's not the same friend I had when I was age 8 to 24. For the last 16 years, I have a new friend... I love her, but she's not the same person by a long shot.

Just a little addon to what my woman,swtp,said about her aunt and school,I remember teachers in elementary school rapping my knuckles with their rulers whenever they caught me writing with my left hand.I can't remember when they gave up that practice,but forcing people to write with the hand they weren't born to write with,is just ludicrous.As to the psycho part,she always says i'm a crazy old man,so maybe there is some truth to that.lol

I"m mainly left-handed & generally considered to be a bit "off the wall". I have Manic Depression , which is obviously a mental illness.
My life is filled with music. We have get togethers on Friday/Sat/Sun, where people just turn up with acoustic guitars, bongo drums etc , & we eat, drink, play , sing & make merry.
I wonder that ,if i was right handed & used mainly my left brain, i wouldn"t have the same mind-set, & wouldnt have met as many fantastically talented people.
I hate Manic Depression & wouldnt wish it upon anyone, but , at the same time, i wouldnt swap my mind for anyone elses. Warts n All.

interesting............ BTW, maybe ambidextrous people are schizophrenic? who knows?

Righty's FTW!!! I used to bug my friend and call him r******ed cause he's left handed.

I'm left handed and although I don't think I'm a sicky I think everyone else is. I don't like to pay double for everything but I like to get paid double. I've gone crazy looking for a free energy source because it would be free. Now most of the middle class world lives off of credit (paying double for everything) and they are doing double the work for half what it's worth. (Proof; corporate is making record profits while most everyone is living paycheck to paycheck.) My doctor says I should be released soon but I told him I want to run it passed you guys first.