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News Briefs 11-07-2005

By Rick MGon

Short and sweet …

Thanks to Kat, and especially to the god-like creators of Beez Neez beer.

Quote of the Day:

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

Aristotle

Rick MG
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12 Comments

  1. WOW!
    Hi Rick,
    That’s the best parrot story I have ever heard!
    I know about Alex, he’s a clever little bugger and must be getting on a bit now.
    Captain amazes me every day with the things he does.He now imitates me wheezing to go with all his other imitations.
    He has a corner in the kitchen on the floor where he plays in the morning while I am tidying up.
    In his corner he has empty boxes he hides in and old bits and pieces of rubbish he collects and he is extremely possessive of it all.
    I have never seen a parrot doing these things before.
    He knows the concept of “hot” as I have taught him when he has his coffee to be careful if it is hot.
    He is a comedian too and deliberately begins to hiccup so that I will hiccup back to him.
    He knows different words too and we used to say bedtime at night, and then we had to spell it, and now we can’t say it at all.We just take him to his cage and say goodnight and he accepts that.

    Some great animal links, specially the furry lobster.Who’da thought!

    About left-handers;I have always found them interesting people and a sure way to get my attention is to show me that you are left-handed.
    I first became interested as a very small kid when I saw the nuns bash the bejesus out of left-handed kids to make them write with their right hands and I felt so sorry for them.
    I have a left-handed son and his perspective on life is incredibly different from anyone else I know.
    I often wondered if the aborigines in Australia have many left-handers and whether it reacts with their intuitive brain which is more in control.
    It’s not the sort of thing you can ask them though.

    Great news, thanks,

    love shadows

  2. left is right
    Hi,

    No need to get sarcastic with regard to lefthanders rick, the article mentions a highly significant fact- a doubling of the number of lefthanders born in russia between 90 and 2005, thats amazing to say the least.
    Not sure how these figures compare to other countries, over here (netherlands) the figure has been higher than global average for a long time. In my family too lefthandedness has been a regular occurance, the hand of the devil as they used to call it in the good old supersticious days, as such use of the lefthand would be beaten out by the teachers, if need be. So my father wrote left and right handed.

    As for the higher- i’d say better integrative/ synthesizing skills of lefthanders i’d say thats a given, as to where and why they find room to express is another one.
    One could speculate looking at the russian and dutch data that lefthandedness occurs more often where there’s (more)room to move in a mental sense. It should be interesting to compare the lefthanded figures from the us-biblebelt with say the frisco bay area for the last decades, there should be significant differences…

    ” do unto others as you would have them do unto you “

    1. More Left-Handed?
      Is it really that there are more Left-Handed or could it be that there is less of a repressive attitude against Left-Handedness that allows people to ‘grow’ Left-Handed without being coerced into Right-Handedness?

      1. well yes
        You would think that treating left handers as the evil ones would lead to people say “I’m right-handed”. And as Richard says, some people are not really sure when they are really young, so being forced into right-handedness could distort the natural count.

        1. left & right
          Hi earthling,

          Sure people would hide lefthandedness then, but when do you think this was first measured in a relevant way.
          I’m sure little children were abused, forcing them the use of the right hand. After that ordeal they ‘d have an advantage- the use of both hands and most likely a bigger pipe to the other side of the brain. Something that should be advantageous for the rest of their lives, more secure offspring… just a little brush…

          ” do unto others as you would have them do unto you “

          1. It doesn’t work like that
            Hi Tox,

            From my observations people who were born left-handed and forced to write right-handed are still left-handed people who write badly with the right hand.
            It doesn’t so much give you a bigger pipe to the other side of the brain as confuse the hell out of you.
            For many years I played tennis daily until I had an injury to my right arm.
            I couldn’t give up my tennis so I tried to play left-handed.If I managed to co-ordinate my arm to move the racquet to hit the ball, I did so at the detriment of the co-ordination to my legs. I had so many serious falls from not being able to move my legs correctly that I had to give it up.

            Where people are happy to use their non-dominant hand it can be a valuable adjunct, but where young children are forbidden to use their dominant hand it can mean disaster.
            Some of the worst cases of stuttering result from such a course of action.

            I was always happy for my children to use either hand and as a result they all have a dominant hand but see no problem with using the other hand as well.

            Did anyone realise that animals also have the attribute of handedness?
            I have observed many dogs over the years and noticed that some favour one front paw over the other.

            I can’t see the relationship to more secure offspring.

            shadows

          2. right
            Of course, when people face adversity at a young age, some grow because of it, and some suffer permanent damage, this is true. Even when there is no active supression, living with right handed tools can force you to think more, or fumble more if you don’t. I was just saying that there quite likely were more lefthanders than reported, particularly in societies that counted those things.

            Aside from that, I think that societies that prefer uniformity and averageness in their population are aiming to be, well, average.

            Plus, being left handed is a nice advantage in tennis, or in a swordfight.

          3. you’re right on all counts
            I think some left-handers have a definite advantage.
            I was most impressed when my left-handed son at the age of 4 years managed to teach himself to use a right-handed can opener.
            The reason for this was that he loved tinned spaghetti and always worried that he would starve between meals.
            (There was no chance of that but he hadn’t worked that out at that age).
            I kept plenty of cans in the cupboard and one day I found him eating from one and realised that he had opened it himself.
            He has proved to be a very resourceful person.

            shadows

  3. indiadaily.com
    …
    Time is actually
    multidimensional.     An entity **

    can (co/*)exist in many different
    time(s and )dimensions (at the same time. In/*)
    other words you

    exist here and you
    also exist in many
    other instances.
    Simply put, there     are really many of “you”.They are
    independent in their own axis but are connected to form

    the entire entity.
    The existence of the same
    entity in many dimensions
    is part of the real existence.

    Close
    …
    * = simultaneously)
    ** — everything there is you can talk to
           only the common tendency here is that
           it has no point if you misadress that
           is also when the adressing is ignored

  4. Thinking about taking the CURE
    >>Without alcohol, I couldn’t do the Monday news.

    Well, that explains a lot! haha Possibly including, why you didn’t post this article I sent. 😉

    I’m posting it anyway, since it seems just about all of us need to read this article about Bioresonance Therapy Cures: ‘My feet were black. Nicotine seemed to be coming out of every pore in my body’.

    Since I’m too pooped at the moment to do it myself, would someone please look up more information on this. I remember reading that it supposedly cures many other things – with a flick of the frequency dial.

    Yo, Peter L. in London, you got an extra bedroom I could stay in if I decide to fly over the pond to get zapped? 😉

    Kat

  5. Handedness and the Brain
    by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P.

    Before talking about handedness and the brain, it’s worthwhile to ask, Why does handedness exist at all? The answer is, no one really knows! There are a lot of theories, most of which don’t hold up well.

    For example, one theory suggests that ancient warriors who held their swords in their right hands and their shields in the left, were more likely to survive (because the shields covered their hearts). According to this theory, right-handedness became the norm over time by natural selection–those who were right-handed survived, and those who weren’t didn’t. However, the heart really sits pretty much in the middle of the chest, and there’s archeological evidence that most people were right-handed long before swords were invented, so this premise seems unlikely.

    Smart use of the brain’s surface area
    A more convincing reason, I think, has to do with specialization of the brain. Like large programs that eat up memory on your computer, complex hand movements use up a lot of brainpower. It would be a waste to have both hands be capable of these movements when just one hand will do.

    You can think of it in terms of real estate on the brain’s surface. The surface of the brain is where most of the complex computing takes place. All the folds and crevices that make brains look like brains are there to increase the surface area and as a result, the brain’s computing power. But even so, there is only a limited amount. Controlling all of the tiny hand muscles that are used in writing requires a lot of brainpower and thus a lot of brain-surface area. In the end, it would be wasteful to devote a lot of real estate on both sides of the brain to controlling fine hand movements that only really need to be done by one hand.

    Methods of locating brain functions
    We’ve known for more than 100 years that different brain functions take place in different parts of the brain. Believe it or not, in the old days, scientists found this out by surgically opening up the skull, poking at different parts of the brain surface, and asking the patient what he felt.

    Researchers later learned to put half of the brain to sleep by injecting anesthetics into the blood vessels that supply that half only. They could then study which functions stopped working and thereby locate them on one side or the other. For example, when the left side of the brain is put to sleep, most people temporarily lose the ability to talk, although they may be able to sing (a right-brain function).

    Nowadays, we have high-tech scans that can show where in the brain the nerve cells are most active. Computer-generated pictures of the brain then light up to show, for example, that listening to someone talking activates a particular region on the left side, while reading a book activates other regions in the back and sides.

    The right and left hemispheres
    As you may (or may not) remember from high school biology, the brain is made up of two distinct sides, or hemispheres, like the two sides of a sandwich cookie. The right hemisphere is almost completely separate from the left, with only a small band of nerve fibers connecting the two. The right hemisphere controls the muscles on the left side of the body, while the left hemisphere controls the muscles on the right.

    This switch-over is hard-wired in the developing brain. As the brain and spinal cord are forming, nerves originating on one side of the body send out long extensions, called axons, toward the midline of the body. Most of the axons proceed to cross over the midline and so end up connecting with the other side of the body. For right-handed people, the hand control center is much better developed on the left side of the brain than on the right. For those who are left-handed, the better-developed nerves live in the right hemisphere.

    Differences are physical, too
    But left-handed brains are not simply mirror images of right-handed ones. Functions such as verbal language are usually located in the left hemisphere regardless of handedness. However, among left-handers, there is a greater likelihood that the language centers turn out to be located on the right side or on both sides of the brain. In other words, the brains of left-handed people tend to be different, and to have a greater variety of configurations, than those of right-handed people. These differences have many implications for the different ways some left- and right-handers think.
    http://www.drspock.com/article/0,1510,5813,00.html

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