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You Might Be Left-Handed Because You Didn’t Practice Being Right-Handed Hard Enough, Scientists Say

All told, the findings suggest that the brain isn’t favoring one hand or the other.

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Whether you’re left- or right-handed might not have as much to do with biology as it does with how much time and effort you’ve spent using one hand over the other. According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the real advantage of your dominant hand may come from decades of practice with it rather than anything your genes are telling you to do.

The nature of handedness has been debated for decades, specifically whether it’s controlled by one hemisphere of the brain over another. Researchers at UCLA and Johns Hopkins University decided to test that idea by separating raw motor ability from learned skill.

Researchers had volunteers perform basic reaching tasks with both arms, first........

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