Why did illiterate Russian soldiers march to the sounds of "straw-hay, straw-hay", why does the left testicle incline more downward, and is it possible that inertia is a key to the secrets of the universe?
Emily Nussbaum
In the portrait painted by Johann Tischbein in 1787, Goethe is seen with a left foot at the end of his right foot
The Muppets, it turns out, are Itras; Puppet operators need their more flexible and dexterous hand to operate the puppet head. Odors are stronger when inhaled through the right nostril, and the first known iter was Ehud ben Gera of the tribe of Benjamin. Ethers are better swordsmen (but they don't die earlier nor are they more creative). These are just some of the facts that Chris McManus discovers in his new book, "Right Hand, Left Hand".
But McManus, a professor of psychology and medical education at University College London, has assembled more than a collection of mere trivia. In fact, he developed in his lively, chatty and detail-obsessed way - no less than a key that explains the secrets of the universe. Itarot, he believes, is the surprising link that connects the chain of life, tying together everything, from the beating heart on the left side of the body to the asymmetry of all creation. "The key to building complexity is
Asymmetry," claimed McManus, a Brit with a mischievous twinkle in his eye (and a right-handed one) during a meeting in the cafeteria before the I-Nobel Awards (Ignobel plays on words that also mean not noble), where he was to win an honor for one of his findings.
Edgar Allan Poe as seen (center). On the right: an image consisting of the multiplication of the left half of his face, on the left: an image consisting of the multiplication of the right half of his face. Asymmetries of the human body
He did admit that not all the evidence is available, but he suspects that the facts will tip things in his direction soon. The book itself gathers knowledge from every possible field, from physics to philosophy, from politics to semantics, with a few stopovers in mathematics and chemistry. You can even find a song in it titled "Toward the Liberation of the Left Hand". And all these make it less of a textbook and more of an enthusiastic brainstorming session in the university dorms at three in the morning.
Part of this dizzying feeling stems from the special nature of the right and left categories. Right and left, as McManus says, are "among the most confused and confusing words in everyday use." These banal terms are completely relative to the viewer's perspective and therefore cannot be described in words alone. In fact, in order to explain them, visual tools must be used - not one of those dangling from the ends of our arms. To prove this McManus suggests imagining that we are trying to explain the terms right and left to an intelligent armless (and heart) creature from Mars: it is impossible. Furthermore, there are some neurological conditions that impair the ability to distinguish between right and left. The Russian Imperial Army itself was once forced to order that straw and hay be tied to the feet of illiterate soldiers and shout to the recruits, instead of left-right left-right, "Straw-hay, straw-hay!" Even the physicist Richard Feyman used a mole on the back of his hand so that the categories wouldn't get confused.
According to McManus, all life forms have some variation on left and right terms, starting at the molecular level. Neutrinos are neutrinos, DNA tilts to the right, and shells spin both ways. Mechanical objects, from spiral staircase presses to screwdrivers, stand out in their asymmetries, while the right and left hemispheres of the brain work together in a kind of one-sided burlesque show.
McManus also believes that the asymmetry of molecules could have triggered asymmetry all the way up the evolutionary ladder. Indeed, the human body is asymmetrical. He is actually a machine of asymmetry in an almost cartoonish way; Tiny clockwise lashes stimulate the development of his heart on the left side, and the heart in turn drives the rest of the internal organs into their efficient and unbalanced tangle of tubes and pockets. The left testicle, for example, descends more not because it is heavier as the ancient Greeks thought, but because a tubercle of internal tubes powered by the heart makes this position more efficient (a 1979 paper on the subject earned McManus his Ignobel Award). .
But each of these rules has troubling exceptions. For example, there are people whose hearts beat on the right side, not on the left, and all their other organs are therefore reversed accordingly - without any negative side effects. Mysteriously, people with such an "opposite" body are no more likely than others to be obese.
If the science of itra is fascinating, it is its cultural manifestations that make one frown. According to McManus's findings, humans feel, apparently intuitively, that the right, and clockwise, is better, stronger and more natural. This is expressed above all in language: it is enough to compare the two words gauche (left, awkward) and sinister (left, bad, ominous) to the roots of the words flexibility, agility and diligence (dexterity, adroitness) rooted in the right. In the New Testament, God separates the blessed sheep that turn to the right and the cursed goats that turn to the left. In the Koran there is a similar division. In the Middle Ages itra was considered a sign of the devil, and in Albania during the tyrannical rule of Enver Hodja it was illegal.
As for the political use of left and right, McManus confirms that it was indeed derived from the seating order in the French National Assembly of 1789, but he adds a surprising comment, that the arrangement of seats in the assembly may not have been arbitrary: people who choose to sit in the left part of a room tend to move their eyes more spontaneously to the right, While those sitting on the right tend to look more to the left, and there is a correlation between these trends and different character traits. Because of this, it is possible that the assembly's seating plans and, as a result, our political language reflect "deep personality differences" between leftists and rightists.
Humans biologically predisposed to use the left hand must have had to bear the brunt of their society's prejudices, sometimes in vicious ways. In Zulu culture, for example, parents scald an iter child with boiling water. But even without such an overt stigma, Itrim cannot escape the constant dominant symbolism of left and right, which extends from arranging corpses at funerals to table manners. Even when it comes to abstract symbols there is a preference of right over left. For example, in the tradition of signs, miracles and symbols of noble families and knights: the front band (bend dexter) from the right shoulder to the left waist symbolized a legitimate son, while the back band (bend sinister) from the left shoulder to the lower right side was the symbol of the bastard.
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