Typing makes dumb, new study says. Or does it? (Patreon)

 [This is a transcript with links to references.]

Do you still write by hand? Anything besides shopping lists? A new study looked at what happens in our brain when we write by hand or type on the keyboard, and it makes a really strong case for handwriting. I personally quite like handwriting and I am totally convinced it’s good for, well, something, so I should be extra sceptical of this finding. But let’s have a look.

Handwriting is becoming less and less common. A YouGov survey from 2022 found that about 2 percent of people have basically stopped handwriting completely, and another 3 percent do it less than once a year. I imagine that’s this emergency situation when you really really need to write down that clever pun. The survey also found that younger people write less by hand and that women are more likely to write by hand every day.

When I was at school, we learned cursive writing first and block letters later.  But my children learned block letters first because most of the text they read today is printed block letters.  And by now they happily type away on their phones and tablets. What’s it doing to their brains?

I find this an interesting question because I feel like handwriting is a much more conscious act than typing. If I imagine handwriting a word, I can tell you exactly how to do it. And I can type the same word on a keyboard. But I cannot for the hell of it tell you where the keys actually are. The typing process seems to go through an unconscious channel into the motor cortex. Handwriting doesn’t. I find that very curious and it does make me wonder if we’re really losing something by typing.

But there are good reasons for this shift from handwriting to typing. Notably, typing on a keyboard is at least at present more efficient and faster.  If you want your text to appear in any standard font, either online or in print, or because it’s submitted through a digital medium, it makes sense to use a keyboard.

There’s also the issue that handwriting can be difficult to decipher.  I sometimes can’t even read my own writing, not to mention that of others. Can you imagine handwritten twitter? Oh sorry, I thought you meant extra fries, not exercise! And what does amazon do with all these supposed “signatures” they’ve collected anyway?

So maybe complaining about the switch from handwriting to keyboard typing is just good old resistance to change.  Like old people were probably complaining when younger people began writing on paper rather than carving stones because you know, with a pen you don’t really build same muscles the same way.

But handwriting does seem to have benefits. At the very least, brain scans have shown that it activates more brain circuits. Though this isn’t so surprising because making more complex hand movements should do that. If you watch this video while I am speaking that will also activate more brain regions than if you close your eyes. But so what.

But some studies have found that handwriting helps if you want to remember something, kind of. For example, a study from 2014 found that students who took notes on laptops couldn’t recall as much about their notes as students who wrote by hand on a notepad.

In one experiment, they recruited about 100 students in Los Angeles and asked them to take notes of a lecture. They divided them into two groups, one took notes on laptop, the other by hand.  A week later, half of each group was allowed to study their notes, the other one not, and then everyone was asked questions about the lecture. The handwriting students who were allowed to study their notes did best, especially on factual questions.

And while that is very interesting it could well be that students who take notes by hand just tend to be better at notetaking.

So I am not very convinced of the memory benefit, but handwriting has been found to quite convincingly benefit the visual recognition of letters and similar drawings. A metaanalysis from 2022 looked at 50 studies that were mostly on children who were learning to read and write. They found that learning to write by hand had moderate to large benefits when later learning to recognize letters, whether handwritten or not. For example, those who learned handwriting were less likely to confuse letters like d and b.

Just why that is so isn’t entirely clear, there are two competing hypotheses. One is the Perceptual Variability Hypothesis that has it that handwriting trains the link between vision and movement, so that letters later have a motion aspect to it. The other is the visual analysis hypothesis that has it that handwriting trains your ability to identify just how a thing is made up in general.

For the new study now they looked at something else, that is the number of connections that handwriting creates in the brain.  For this, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recruited 36 students and recorded their brain activity with 250 electrodes while the students were either writing with a pen or typing on a keyboard. They then analysed the recording in different frequency bands and looked for correlations.  The students who were writing by hand showed significantly more such correlations.  The researchers argue that these widespread correlations across the brain are good because they are known to be important for memory formation.

I find this very interesting but also think it’s a rather indirect conclusion. Maybe handwriting activated more brain regions because young people do it so rarely. Though I really want to believe that handwriting is good for the brain. Until I stop doing it, then I think it won’t be so useful after all.