Re: OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

On 24/02/2025 9:09 pm, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
 [...]

But, YOU determine your sexual preferences, sexuality, gender, etc.
You might "leak" hints to careful observers, but YOU are the defining
entity.  Whereas, in each of the preceding, you are likely the LAST
to know (or admit).
>
[That's not to say that there aren't folks who refuse to acknowledge
their own preferences -- likely because they KNOW there are social
(and likely business/economic) consequences to that!]

 That is the critical point: there is what you are - and there is what
you do about it.   Like left-handedness, trying to suppress something
that is part of who you are will eventually take its toll on your
well-being.

Left-handedness is slightly different. It doesn't seem to be the
opposite of right-handedness, but rather a state in which brain
localisation of function isn't closely defined.
One of my wife colleagues used an elaborate electro-encephlograph to work out which bits of the brain were doing which which bits of speech process shortly after the speech being processed had hit the ears.
She wouldn't test left-handers because the processing locations weren't the same from one left-handed test subject to the next. Most right-handers had much more predictable processing locations.
Most of the incidence and heritability statistic make more sense if you look at it as a contrast between between predictable right-handedness and less predictable random assignment.
My father wrote with his right hand, but only because his teachers had insisted on it. I'm left handed, so is my younger brother but my youngest brother isn't. My mother wrote with her right hand, but the handedness preferences of her three kids do suggest that she'd been lucky, rather than genetically programmed.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney