René Westerhausen

Category: Publication

  • Handedness of Acclaimed Architects: Are Left-Handers More Talented?

    Handedness of Acclaimed Architects: Are Left-Handers More Talented?

    By examining the handedness of acclaimed architects the post explores the popular belief that left-handers posses a greater artistic talent than right-handers.

    Reading popular‑science articles, blog posts, or online discussions about left‑handedness, one regularly comes across the claim that left‑handers possess a special talent for artistic expression. Ask your favourite generative‑AI chatbot, and you will readily be informed that left‑handers are thought to be over‑proportionally often found in the “creative fields” including visual art, music, or writing [1]. You might even get offered a list of names of supposed left-handed artists as examples for this creative left-handedness, with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Jimi Hendrix, or Lady Gaga, topping that list [2].

    While it is not entirely clear where this popular belief in “creative left-handers” originated, one root appears to stretch back to a series of studies examining the handedness of architects. Conducted in the 1970s and led by John Peterson, these studies reported that left-handers were surprisingly common at the Department of Architecture at the University of Cincinnati [3]. Instead of the roughly 10% prevalence expected in the general population, about 29% of the academic staff and 16% of the school’s students were reported to be left-handers. Even more intriguingly, the left-handed students were also more successful. The rate of graduation was about 10% points higher in left-handers than in their right-handed peers.

    It is not really surprising that these astonishingly clear findings were taken as evidence for a special talent for architecture among left‑handers. Peterson’s observations were accordingly cited as a key evidence for the formulation of a general theory about human brain development [4]. It was argued that both being left‑handed and having a strong visual‑constructive imagination were the result of an accentuated maturation of the brain’s right hemisphere. This maturation, in turn, was hypothesised to be driven by unusually high prenatal levels of the hormone testosterone.

    The validity of this theory has been seriously questioned ever since its conception. Yet, it offers a good story which at the time made it a quite influential theory. So, it is not unlikely that it helped cementing the idea of “creative left handedness” both in the heads of many scientists and, via journalists, also in the public mind.

    Considering the handedness of architects, it must be noted, however, that most later studies that attempted to replicate Peterson’s findings failed to do so. And, when I first started looking into the topic early last year, the idea of an excess of left-handed architects was already standing on quite shaky fundaments. Nevertheless, curious, as I was, I decided to have another look at it and I set out to find left-handers among famous architects. I thought if left-handers were indeed predestined to pursue a career in architecture, they should be particularly well represented among the men and women who have left a lasting mark on our cities.

    The very first name I typed into “google” was Sir Norman Foster, the British star architect. Even if you are not familiar with his name, I am certain you have come across one or two of his buildings. The Millennium Bridge in London, the renovated Reichstag with its modern glass dome in Berlin, or the 2 World Trade Center in New York, are some of the more famous examples. When watching the first documentary I found about him [5], it became quickly obvious – literally within the first shots – that Foster was sketching his ideas holding the pen in his left hand. And, after consulting some more online material, I was quite convinced, he was, in fact, a left-hander.

    Spurred on by this surprisingly quick success, I typed in some other names that came to mind, and I soon landed on the Swiss architect duo Herzog and de Meuron, the minds behind the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg orThe Bird’s Nest, the stadion built for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. While one, Jacques Herzog, was clearly right-handed, the other, Pierre de Meuron, was writing and cutting ribbons with his left hand. Bingo! Another left-hander among the famous architects!

    It was at this point that I decided to approach my hunt for left-handed architects a bit more systemically. Rather than randomly picking the names of architects that popped to my mind – a source which I was aware would soon run dry – I decided to go into the winner lists of various prestigious architecture awards. I started with the Pritzker Architecture prize, which is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel prize for architecture”, but soon went on to include other national and international awards and prizes in my search for relevant names.

    Armed with a set of winners list I began scouring the internet for videos and pictures showing the various architects while they were writing, sketching, or drawing, so I could determine their handedness. And about 600 architects later, I crunched the numbers. Here is what I found [6]:

    Only 8% of the architects were left‑handers (or ambidextrous) which was below rather than above the 10% one would expect in the general population. In other words, left-handed architects, like Foster and de Meuron, were not more common than expected.

    However, many of the architects on the winners lists had been born and grown up in times in which left-handers were subject to retraining. So, it was not possible to exclude that some members of my sample had been taught, against their inborn preference for the left hand, to write – and maybe also sketch – with their right hand. Ignoring this historical trend would obviously result in an underestimation of the amount of true left-handers in my sample. I had to make sure that this was not the case.

    Since the 1950s retraining has gone increasingly out of fashion[7] and by selectively excluding architects born before 1950, it was possible to minimise the effect of retraining on my results. And, doing so, the incidence of left-handedness was indeed increased in this younger cohort. Nevertheless, the corrected rate of 10% did not differ statistically from the expected population rate. Left-handers were also not unusually frequent among the younger architects.

    In short, it appears that Peterson’s results stand out as an exception. Being a left-hander instead of a right-hander does not really increase the likelihood for becoming a succesful architect.

    Coming back to the common belief in the creative left‑hander, the finding chips away one likely root for this belief, while adding to a growing body of evidence disproving it [8]. Also outside architecture, left‑handers, seen as a group, are neither more creative than right‑handers nor over‑represented in professions commonly considered “creative”. That is, left-handers are likely as talented as right-handers to pursue a career in visual arts, music, design, writing, or architecture.

    [1] Porac, C. (2025). ChatGPT: Tell me what you know about left-handedness. Retrieved August 11, 2025, from, https://sites.psu.edu/clarep/2025/01/17/chatgpt-tell-me-what-you-know-about-left-handedness/

    [2] It can be questioned whether Pablo Picasso or Vincent van Gogh actually were left-handers at all. Both likely painted with their right hand. See Lanthony, P. (1995). Left-handed painters. Revue Neurologique, 151(3), 165–170, and in case of Picasso, video evidence for this is readily available online

    [3] Peterson, J. M., & Lansky, L. M. (1974). Left-handedness among architects: Some facts and speculation. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 38(2), 547–550. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1974.38.2.547; and Peterson, J. M., & Lansky, L. M. (1977). Left-handedness among architects: Partial replication and some new data. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 45(3), 1216–1218. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1977.45.3f.1216

    [4] Known as the Geschwind-Galaburda theory, which can be found on wikipedia.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschwind-Galaburda_hypothesis

    [5] Norman Foster: Striving for Simplicity, 2015, Louisiana Channel, https://youtu.be/hJNxgv9Rak0

    [6] Westerhausen, R. (2025). Handedness of acclaimed architects: No indication for an over-proportional representation of non-right handers. Laterality, 30(2-6), 220-234. https://doi.org/10.1080/1357650X.2025.2569374

    [7] McManus, I. C., Moore, J., Freegard, M., & Rawles, R. (2010). Science in the making: Right hand, left hand. III: Estimating historical rates of left-handedness. Laterality, 15(1-2), 186–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576500802565313; see also previous posts on retraining

    [8] Meta-analysis by Morgan, O., Zhao, S., & Casasanto, D. (2025). Handedness and creativity: Facts and fictions. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1–35. doi:10.3758/s13423-025-02717-2; or see: Røsvoll, Å., Rusten, E. H., & Westerhausen, R. (2024). Left-hand preference in visual artists: a pre-registered observational study on Instagram. Laterality, 29(2), 184-198.  https://doi.org/10.1080/1357650X.2024.2315856 or post here

  • What the Hell is Dichotic Listening? A Beginner’s Guide With Useful Links.

    What the Hell is Dichotic Listening? A Beginner’s Guide With Useful Links.

    The article provides a brief introduction to dichotic listening with helpful links for interested researchers and curious others.

    Dichotic listening is a classical test used by neuropsychologists to determine a person’s brain lateralisation for language functions. Its main appeal is that it is suitable in almost all settings as it is accessible to participants of all ages and abilities. The used speech stimuli are very simple and the instructions are easily understood and followed. Yet, despite its simplicity, the paradigm is a powerful tool to learn about the brain’s functional organisation.

    At the core of the paradigm is the dichotic presentation: two sounds are presented simultaneously via headphones (as shown in the cartoon above), with one sound being played to the left ear and the other one to the right ear.

    Various stimulus sounds have been used by researchers. My favourite version uses short consonant-vowel syllables, like Ka and Pa. These syllables are acoustically very similar to each other, and participants often believe they hear only one stimulus, even though two different stimuli are presented. So, when asked to report what they heard, participants typically just report one of the two stimuli.

    Importantly, however, the reported stimulus is more often the stimulus played to the right ear than the one played to the left ear. This phenomenon is called the right-ear advantage and is linked to how, or better, where the brain typically processes speech and language.

    In most people, speech processing is primarily a function of the left hemisphere, while only in small minority of the population (about 15%) the opposite is the case. We know this from clinical observations, where identifying the location of language processing is essential; for example, when planning brain surgery. Here, the location of the brain’s language centers has traditionally been determined by briefly anaesthetising one hemisphere at a time. If the anaesthesia prevents the patient from speaking, the “sedated” hemisphere is obviously the one responsible for speech processing.

    Intriguingly, studies in the 1960s [1], that were conducted on these patients, showed that those with left-hemispheric dominance for language also prefer to report stimuli from the right ear when tested with dichotic listening. Reversely, those with dominance of the right hemisphere, preferred the left-ear stimuli. The hemisphere opposite to the preferred ear, was the one dominant for language. That is, the ear preference shown in dichotic listening was a pretty good predictor of which hemisphere was processing language in these patients.

    But, how could this oddly “crossed” association be explained? One influential theoretical model [2] explains this by pointing out that each ear is predominantly connected to the opposite hemisphere. So, if the relevant language centers are, as typically is the case, located in the left hemisphere, the stimulus from the right ear will be the first to get access to language processing. This “first” stimulus will consequently dominante the subjective perception, which leads to the right-ear advantage. For a comprehensive discussion of this model and competing theoretical explanations can be found in an article published a few years ago [3] (which can be found here).

    Today, dichotic‑listening paradigms are widely used to determine which hemisphere supports language processing. However, over the six decades since the paradigm was first introduced, numerous versions of the paradigm have emerged, and not all are equally suitable for this purpose. Design choices – such as the type of stimuli, the number of trials, or the instructions given – can substantially influence the outcome. At the same time, the extensive body of evidence that is available can be used to inform on how to design an optimal paradigm. A guide to support researchers in designing their own dichotic‑listening protocols has recently been published [4](and can be found here).

    Naturally, we also designed an own optimal version of a dichotic-listening paradigm following these guidelines [5] (link). The empirical testing of the paradigm looked promising suggesting an excellent reliability. The paradigm (EPrime version) and stimulus material can be downloaded from the accompanying OSF page (here). It also includes some additional recommendation concerning the testing equipment as well as the data collected when first testing the new paradigm.

    [1] Kimura, D. (1961). Cerebral dominance and the perception of verbal stimuli”. Canadian Journal of Psychology.,15(3), 166–171. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0083219

    [2] Kimura, D. (1967). Functional Asymmetry of the Brain in Dichotic Listening. Cortex, 3 (2), 163–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-9452(67)80010-8

    [3] Westerhausen, R. & Kompus, K. (2018). How to get a left-ear advantage: A technical review of assessing brain asymmetry with dichotic listening. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 59 (1): 66–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12408

    [4] Westerhausen, R. (2019). A primer on dichotic listening as a paradigm for the assessment of hemispheric asymmetry. Laterality, 24(6), 740–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/1357650X.2019.1598426

    [5] Westerhausen, R., & Samuelsen, F. (2020). An optimal dichotic-listening paradigm for the assessment of hemispheric dominance for speech processing. PLoS ONE, 15(6), e0234665. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234665

  • The brain hemispheres are not better connected in left handers

    The brain hemispheres are not better connected in left handers

    The corpus callosum is the major connection between the two hemisphere of the brain and, accordingly, it is the main channel for communication between the two halves. In the 1980s a series of influential publications suggested that the corpus callosum is actually bigger in left and mixed handers when compared with right handers. Since then, callosal differences due to handedness are commonly referred to when behavioural differences between handedness groups have to be explained. However, in a recent meta-analysis and in a separate empirical study, we were able to show that the effects of handedness are small and likely negligible for behaviour. A recording of a presentation of the findings at the North Sea Laterality meeting 2022 in Bergen, can be found here (youtube).

  • Visual artists are not more often left handers

    Visual artists are not more often left handers

    A series of famous visual artists, like Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Klee, or Maurits C. Escher, are said to have been left handers, and examples like these have contributed to the popular belief that left handedness was associated with a special artistic talent. Besides this anecdotal evidence, the somewhat limited scientific literature provides, at best, modest evidence in support of this claim. So, to investigate the postulated association, we conducted an observational study on the social media platform “Instagram” examining the hand preference of visual artists who share video clips (“reels”) of their artistic activities. We found that roughly 9% of the artists showed a left-hand preference, which is (statistically) comparable to the 10-11% expected for the general population. Also, the such identified left-handed artists did not attract more “likes” or “followers” than their right-handed counterparts. In summary, we do not find any indication that left handers are more talented for visual artistic activities.