Reading Palms- For Health, Not the Future

            My parents are obsessed with yoga. This was made obvious last Thanksgiving.

In New Jersey at my aunt’s house, winding down a long leisurely dinner (lots of Indian food), my dad talks yoga to my cousin, a skeptical 17 year old boy.

            
    “Put your palms together- no, not like that, just line them up next to each other,” says my dad. My cousin follows, anticipating being walked through a yogic contortion of the hands. His face is scrunched up, preemptively defensive in case he should fail this test. “Try to make all the ridges line up. Like mine. See, how the indentations in my fingers and palms are almost a perfect mirror image? Now look at yours.”

                My cousin looks at his hands. The ridges are woefully misaligned.

                I try it too. My hands aren’t as misaligned as his, but the symmetry is still nowhere near perfect.

                “That’s a sign that your life is out of balance,” says my dad. “Yoga can fix that. My palms didn’t match either, until I started doing yoga.”

                The preemptive-defensive scrunch deepens. “Yoga doesn’t have anything to do with it,” mumbles my cousin. “Humans are supposed to be asymmetrical. Anything else is unnatural.”

                Great, I think. The poor boy’s going to develop another complex.

                “But think about it. There’s a reason humans are mostly symmetrical, right? Doesn’t that suggest that being completely symmetrical is better?”

                “It’s hereditary.” My cousin’s voice rises to a louder defensive mumble. “It’s not something we can control.”

                My mom tries another tactic. “It’s a sign of homeostasis,” she explains. Mentally I applaud her word choice: my cousin is an AP Bio nerd. “If your hands are mirror images, it’s a sign that there’s balance in your mind and body, and in your way of thinking. It’s always better to be a balanced person than an unbalanced one, right?”

                “I’m not unbalanced!” My cousin twists and bends his hands, trying and failing to make the indentations line up. I start clearing the table. If I get involved, it’s likely I’ll be sitting at this table listening to everybody’s arguments and counter-arguments all night. Though I don’t show this, I’m also a bit put out at the implication that I, with my also-asymmetrical hands, am unbalanced.

                Later, I decided to see if there was some basis in what my parents were saying, if it’s been scientifically proven that more symmetrical palms indicate a more balanced or healthier person.

                It’s true.

                I found many studies about facial symmetry, demonstrating that people find more symmetrical faces more attractive than asymmetrical ones, and hypothesizing that facial symmetry is a signal for health. But I was more interested in the palms question.

                Humans are a bilaterally symmetrical species. If you were to cut a human body down the middle and place a mirror in between, the human would look pretty much normal (from the outside- we’re not symmetrical from the inside: just think of the digestive system!). So it stands to reason that symmetrical hands and feet would signal health as honestly as symmetrical facial structure.

                But my cousin wasn’t wrong. Some asymmetry is natural. There are three kinds of asymmetry we can have: directional asymmetry (in which one side of your body is more “deviant” from the symmetry than the other, for example, if your right hand, right foot, and right eye were all a little bigger), antisymmetry (for example, your right hand and right eye are bigger, but your left foot and left- I don’t know- hipbone are bigger), and fluctuating asymmetry.

“Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is defined as the random, stress-induced deviations from perfect symmetry that develop during the development of bilaterally symmetrical traits.”¹ Fluctuating asymmetry is an honest signal for your developmental stability- how well your body is able to translate your genes into the proteins that make up your body and its functions. “Good developmental stability suggests greater resistance to environmental stresses.”¹ The less FA you have, the more developmentally stable you are.

                Lots of the information in the review article was about reasons for FA beyond a person’s control. In general, the more FA you have, the more stressful or traumatic your development was. It might mean your mom had health problems or was exposed to toxins in her environment when she was pregnant with you. It might mean you grew up in stressful conditions. It might mean you’re going through puberty and the proliferation of sex hormones is temporarily sapping your body of energy to devote to developmental stability. It might mean you’re old and your body’s in decline. It might mean you have schizophrenia- it’s known that schizophrenics have higher FA, and the worse your symptoms are, the more pronounced your asymmetry. It could also mean you’re autistic.

                FA also signals personality traits. Apparently, men with lower FA (men who are more symmetrical) are more socially dominant, aggressive, and violent.¹

But where the review article got really interesting for me, was when it talked about how FA signals your emotional state.

“[A study] found facially asymmetrical men to be more depressed, more emotionally labile, and more impulsive than relatively symmetrical men. Asymmetrical women experienced more muscle soreness and were also more impulsive than more symmetrical women.”¹

                Hmmm. So here’s a lead. If you are asymmetrical, it could mean something is messed up in your emotions, which could come from a flawed way of thinking or approaching the world.

                FA occurs in the hands as well as the face, I’ve found. The word for the study of the ridges in one’s skin is dermatoglyphics.  Dermatoglyphics can be a good gauge for how severe a schizophrenic’s symptoms are. The palms are an easy place to look, because the lines are clearly visible and it’s easy to hold your hands, palms up, side by side.

                I know that yoga can help a great deal with psychological and physical disorders. It’s not a big leap to imagine that yoga’s effects can, in turn, reduce FA. Not entirely, of course- if your mom smoked while pregnant, there’s probably nothing you can do to convert your palms to total symmetry. But if your main causes for FA are that you don’t eat, sleep and exercise the way you should, and your worldview is making you stressed-out in some way, you can fix that. In that case, watching the gradual re-shifting of the lines in your palms toward symmetry would be a desired effect, a way of monitoring the restoration of balance in your body and mind.

                I don’t think it’s something to fixate on the way my cousin did for the rest of that vacation. I don’t think it’s something to get a complex about, if your palm lines are slightly misaligned. But if you try yoga or a similar healthy lifestyle choice, and after a few months or years see that your palms are more symmetrical than they were, it might give you a burst of affirmation that you’re doing something right.

Source:

Kowner, Rotem. “Psychological perspective on human developmental stability and fluctuating asymmetry: Sources, applications and implications.” British Journal of Psychology 2001, 92: 447-469. Print.