Writing Beats Typing
The act of writing by hand unsurprisingly changes our brain in ways actual typing cannot, according to neuroscientist Audrey van der Meer from Norway.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The neuroscientist apparently recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Students either wrote the word on a touchscreen with a digital pen, sometimes they typed it out.
Interestingly, different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task and when the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The parts of our brain in charge of our memory, sensory integration, and the piecing of new information were all coordinating together.
But when the same students typed the same word, that coordination stopped, almost just falling away. The connections apparent to the neuroscientist team were not present on the EEG.
It’s the same word, same brain, same person, but two completely different neurological events. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, the researchers found. Our fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of our brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
I’m a writer and I now type out my columns but I often still draft out notes or thoughts on a notebook using a #2 pencil. Some habits hard to give up, some still important to the creative process or to the way we learn. I am not so sure typing is inherently bad in the way that the research found, unless it is the only way we capture what we’re hearing. I always believe writing it forces us to be more efficient, to think about what we heard and write down only what is necessary - a key phrase. That’s what my years as a reporter forced me to do when there were no phones or ipads to type into during interviews or meetings.
Today’s generation growing up are faced this sort of learning temptation. But Van der Meer says pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and unsurprisingly children using ipads to read and write cannot distinguish between b and d.
You can be more efficient and capture more words and more accurately collect what’s said but do you learn it in the way writing it with your own hands and fingers allows. The invention of AI in giving us the answers is another related issue - learn by typing a prompt, or learn by thinking and asking and listening to others who may know?
Be the tortoise, not the hare. Take the longer road - it’s more interesting, and more stimulating.