Transcription
All right, I want to talk today about the radial loop fingerprint pattern. Um, and I just want to talk a little bit about the history of that pattern and its understanding because I kind of make the mistake of thinking and saying, um, that I'm the first person to have delineated the psychological significance of the pattern. And, um, and I was reviewing, um, some other works by other authors, um, particularly Bar Hutchinson and Fred Gettings recently.
So, Bar Hutchinson's *Your Life in Your Hands*, which is one of the go-to books that you, if you don't have it, you really should try and get hold of it. It is a very good book. And the other one, which is Fred Gettings' *Book of the Hand*, um, which I've got here, but rather a dull cover, so I won't show you the cover. But basically, *The Book of the Hand* is, um, a very, very important book by Fred Gettings. Whoops, going the wrong way again. So it's getting the camera right there. So those two books are really, really important. And I'm reviewing those. And in reading those books, I discovered that, of course, actually, they did talk about the psychological significance of the radial loop pattern. And, and that's interesting to me because I, I do have this view that it was something that was developed by myself and a woman called Claire Norris.
Um, I was living in Norwich and I first learned hand reading in Norwich in 1983, '84. And in 1985, uh, 1985-'86 is when I met Claire. And we, and I was teaching hand reading, and we were going through the basics of the hand and fingerprint patterns. And, and I was talking about loop fingerprint patterns in relationship to the element water and saying, well, loops of all by the element water and they're very flexible and adaptable and, you know, easygoing. And she came to me one class and said, well, I've just taken this handprint of this guy, he's my boss at work, and he's absolutely not flexible and adaptable at all. He's completely not like that at all. Um, you know, this is rubbish, it doesn't work. We looked at his hands, and he had what was called a radial loop. And a radial loop is a loop fingerprint pattern that goes in the other direction. And I'll just show you what I mean by that in case you're not quite clear about the difference between a radial loop and an ulnar loop.
But an ulnar loop, which is the most commonly occurring loop, is a loop that basically goes from the little finger side towards the thumb. So the ulnar loop goes that way around. It's open on the ulnar side and it goes towards the radial side. And that is the most common, uh, loop pattern you find. It's basically occurs on 80% of index, of little fingers, 66% of of middle fingers, and only about 20%, 25%, no, 30% of index fingers. So it's relatively rare on the index finger. But if you look at the in, if you look at the radial loop, the radial loop is, um, goes in the opposite direction. It goes from the thumb side towards the little finger. So it's open to the out, outside. And that was the clue as to what oriented us to to understanding the significance of the pattern.
Now, the index fingers have to do with your sense of self-identity and the sense of who you are. Then you've got a pattern like that, then your sense of identity is very much open to the external world because all these external influences are coming in here. And so it makes for a very different kind of personality than the ulnar loop. The ulnar loop is coming from the inside to the outside, and the flow is going in that particular direction. And so that kind of was the original idea, the observation by Claire that this loop is a bit different from all the other loops. And, and it took some time to kind of, uh, figure out the significance of of of the radial loop on the index finger as we come to understand it now. And we're quite clear about it now. It's anyone who's studied fingerprint patterns understands that the radial loop is a very distinct pattern and it's very, um, unique in its formation and very clear in terms of the behaviors that it tends to generate.
Um, but what I've discovered is, um, what I keep saying is that nobody's written about the radial loop fingerprint pattern from a psychological point of view. I mean, it's mentioned, uh, we know about radial loops. If you go back to read even Francis Galton's work in 1895, radial loops are discussed. The radial loop is the fourth most common fingerprint pattern. So you, you've got loops on the loops, then whorls, then arches, and then radial loops. Radial loops are the fourth most common fingerprint pattern. Um, but again, most people don't talk about it very much. And so when I was reading Fred Gettings, I was very interested to notice that he says, well, the radial loop carries much the same significance as the whorl and is essentially an indication of great individuality, which isn't quite right, although not entirely wrong either. It's an interesting thing. That's it. That's all he has to say about that. He basically says the loop pattern is commonly found and has been divided into two types, the radial loop and the ulnar loop, and the ulnar loop is by far the most common, whilst the radial loop is found occasionally on the finger of Jupiter and only rarely on the finger of Saturn. And so that's, see, basically that's all he says about the the the significance of the radial loop. And he wrote this book in 1965.
Now, in my defense, having said that nobody had written about it before I started talking about it, I didn't buy this book until 1986. So I probably had already started thinking about the significance of the radial R before, um, I actually got hold of this book, before I could have read *The Book of the Hand*. So that's that's something to be said for that. But that's definitely true for, um, for Bar Hutchinson, who, of course, Baron Hutchinson has a very extensive chapter in her book about the meaning of fingerprint patterns. And she also says about the, um, about the radial loop. She says on page 95, there are two types of loop, the ulnar where the latter is thrown from the percussion side of the hand, and the radial where the throw is from the thumb direction. Radial loops are found most commonly on the index finger, sometimes on the thumb, but rarely on the other fingers. Actually, it's never found on the thumb in that barrel, but there you go. Among my records of looped index fingers, 25% are from the radial direction, but only have two on the third fingers. Amongst recent prints, there is an important difference in behavior between radial loops on the first finger, in that the radial loop can ones be adaptable only as long as the choice is from their own interest. They must do the choosing. The ulnar loops are more inclined to act on suggestions that fortune or other people may present to them. And that's it. So that's not very much, really. Not really very much, considering how much I've written about the radial loop pattern and given that people like Carol Caroline Abrams wrote two whole journal articles about about this particular pattern. She, but it is not true what I have kept saying. And so I'm posting this video to correct myself. But I'm the first person to describe the sign, the psychological significance of radial loops as opposed to ulnar loops. That's just not true. But I didn't get this book until, as you can probably see the date there, I didn't buy this book until 1989. So I didn't read this until definitely well after I'd actually been talking about the radial loop as the fingerprint pattern, its significance for a long time. So, you know, that's a very important consideration. You know, that I actually hadn't read the books. We talk about that.
But let's just correct what she said about the distribution. Let me just pull up a document about that so we can share the screen with this one again. Um, so this is a statistical chart of the distributions of radial loop fingerprint patterns, well, actually all the fingerprint patterns. Um, in my own studies, I found that radial loops occurred on about 5% of hands. As you can see, it's the fourth most common fingerprint pattern, and yet it is still, you can really classify that as a minor fingerprint pattern because it's not that common. Um, but it's a relatively common. It's common as the double loop and the peacock's eye. But if we look down, um, the fingers, we can see that the the most common place to find the radial loop is on the index finger, which is about 20%. So Bar Hutchinson's findings of 25% is quite high. Um, but the the radial loop only occurs commonly on the index finger or the water finger, and never occurs on the air finger or actually or the thumb either. It's most rare on the air finger. Let's just go back down here. We can see the rare patterns. All right. So the rare patterns on the palm here, the radial loop on the air finger, I've never seen one on there. Radial loop on the thumb, 0.6% in my studies. Scotland Yard statistics, which is a survey of 50,000 hands, the radial loop only occurs on 0.25% of of thumbs, 0.11% of of air fingers or little fingers, and 0.8, 0.9% of ring fingers. So it's incredibly rare on the the the air finger, the thumb, the little finger, the thumb, and the ring finger, and also pretty rare on the on the middle finger too, on 3%. So even Fred Gettings isn't particularly correct to talk about it being commonly seen on the on the, uh, on the on the earth thing, on the middle finger. So the only place where the, uh, radial loop is common is on the index finger. And my statistics found it to be 20%. Scotland Yard says 24%. Bar Hutchinson says 25%. So it's around 20 to 25% of of index fingers will have a radial loop on it. And so when you come into looking at the radial loop, it's actually that's the only fingerprint pattern we really know what it's what it's about when it occurs on that finger. It doesn't really occur anywhere else. And it's hard to discern the significance of a fingerprint pattern if it doesn't occur on the other digits. So if you see a radial loop in the hand, it's going to be on the index finger. And if you really want the definitive understanding of what the radial loop is all about, then the best person to talk to is someone who's got a radial loop. And Laura Thornton had radial loops, and Caroline Abrams had radial loops, and both of them were psychologists, and they H did an enormous amount of research into their own experiences of that and talking to other people about it, and compiled, um, the most definitive essay on the significance of the radial loop, um, which was published in the Psychological Society journals in 1998, I think.
And what was interesting about Caroline's research was, rather like Gettings suggested, she observed that actually when radial loops are in their fullest extreme, they do become rather like whorls. Um, but that depends on them actually becoming comfortable with being on their own. Um, which initially people with radial loops are often not comfortable to be on their own. But, and actually to find their own way of being in the world, the only way that they can, they can really survive and without being unduly influenced by everybody around them is by finding time and space on their own. And so that's a key thing for someone with a radial loop, um, is that need for space and independence, which of course is very much like the whorl fingerprint pattern as well. So Fred Gettings was on to something there, um, in 1965, although he hadn't really sort of unpacked it all. It's a, it's a very, very important fingerprint pattern. Um, and any system of hand reading that doesn't take into consideration the significance of the radial loop, particularly the radial loop on the index finger, is actually completely overlooking a very, very, very important factor in hand reading. The radial is one of those hand features that if you have one, it kind of overrides everything else. It's a bit like a simian line. It's, you can't ignore it, you can't overlook it. If you have a radial loop, it will basically be the pattern that governs absolutely everything in your life. And is one of the patterns in the hand that is shows that someone has a very poor degree of self-awareness and self-understanding, um, because they're prone to kind of illusions about themselves because of this taking on ideas from out from outside of them. So it's a really tricky pattern to work with, but it's a very important one to note. And the unpacking of that psychologically, although I will claim still that I was the first to write about it, talk about it in the early 1980s, that's not actually true. Bar Hutchinson and Fred Gettings got there first. So hats off to those two for being, uh, pioneers extraordinaire in the history of handwriting.