A few weeks ago, I had to sign several documents witnessed by a friend who also happens to be a judge. When I attempted to write, a kind of neuro-stutter developed between my brain and hand, resulting in an unintelligible scrawl.
At first, I thought this incapacity to sign my own name was due to being watched by someone who judges for a living. But the harsh reality is that the old adage of “use it or lose it” is right – and it applies very much to handwriting too.
I told friends, and several said they’d experienced the same. Screens and keyboards seem to have robbed us of the skill of writing. It’s unnerving, and yet not many of us are doing anything about it.
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It seems both shocking and a little sad to think that the complex neurological communion between hand and brain – developed over thousands of years – might disappear in less than a generation.
As a kid and even a teen, developing a unique cursive style was one of the joys of growing up. I remember experimenting with the flourishes fashionable at the time – a particularly flamboyant “L” or “Y”.
As parents, there is joy in watching a child grapple with the complexities of pen grip, spelling out clumsy capital-letter alphabet shapes, and later seeing them turn into a smooth, singular – and importantly utterly individual – personal writing style.
Then, training to be a journalist, I learned quickly to touch type and all these years later, I still type as quickly as people speak, using recordings solely to check back and test accuracy. It’s a skill I’m thankful for. But writing a condolence card, or a thank you or even Christmas cards electronically has never felt right.
So I’ve always persisted with pen and ink. But a pen in the hand just doesn’t feel natural any more, making me wonder what is happening at the neural level now we are all wedded to our keyboards as well.
I didn’t have to look far. It seems this conundrum has captured the attention of several scientific teams around the world over the past decade. Sifting their recent findings reveals a remarkable agreement on what is going on in our brains.
Prof Audrey van der Meer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, a neuropsychologist and specialist in how infants and toddlers learn, has spent decades investigating how handwriting shapes our brains. She and her team used high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) caps to monitor the neural activity of students as they wrote by hand, or typed notes on a keyboard.
Her team’s landmark paper, published in Frontiers in Psychology, revealed dramatic differences between the two, with handwriting lighting up widespread regions of the brain and showing powerful, synchronised bursts of neural activity in areas linked with memory creation, deep learning and sensory processing. Typing, which involves identical, repetitive finger movements, puts the brain into a kind of autopilot, with little connection to crucial memory and learning centres.
When it came down to results, students who took notes by hand consistently outperformed their peers who worked on laptops.
I think we all know deep down that when we write notes by hand, we listen differently and are forced to use our critical faculties to identify and digest the most important points. We perform a kind of memory edit. Most importantly we have to create a summary in real time that makes sense to us afterwards.
For me at least, the study results explained the very odd feeling of reading back a touch-typed interview and yet having very little memory of the content.
Another fascinating study was published last year by a multi-disciplinary Italian team led by medical and neuroscientific researchers working with Einaudi, a publishing foundation. Their peer-reviewed paper published in Life Journal used neuro-imaging and also concluded that handwriting activates brain regions associated with higher-order cognitive functions – far more so than typing.
However, they widened the scope of their work to reveal an intriguing difference when it came to logographic systems such as Chinese, which require retrieval of complex and visually distinct symbols that individually represent a word or concept. This form of writing engaged different parts of the brain to alphabetic writing systems such as ours, which rely on a relatively small set of symbols (letters) combined systematically to form words.
Specifically, writing Chinese characters involves increased activation of the right hemisphere and those areas we use to process visuospatial problems thanks to the intricate and non-linear nature of the script. Alphabetic systems, on the other hand, predominantly engage the left hemisphere, particularly in phonological processing areas: the place in our brains that wrestles with speech sounds and how they are organised to convey meaning.
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This team put it pretty bluntly: “Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.”
The debate about the effect of technology and screens on young brains is an urgent one. Deep down, we know how profoundly our attention spans and reading habits have changed since the arrival of mobile tech. Google Maps and AI now do our learning and remembering for us.
Among the gloom, if science shows us that the old-fashioned, timeless skill of handwriting contributes so profoundly to our learning capacity and brain development, isn’t it something to embrace? The answer isn’t hard in the end – pick up a pen.
