Posted on 09/18/2019 5:59:05 PM PDT by beaversmom
People are losing the brain benefits of writing by hand as the practice becomes less common
Not so long ago, putting pen to paper was a fundamental feature of daily life. Journaling and diary-keeping were commonplace, and people exchanged handwritten letters with friends, loved ones, and business associates. While longhand communication is more time-consuming and onerous, there’s evidence that people may in some cases lose out when they abandon handwriting for keyboard-generated text.
Psychologists have long understood that personal, emotion-focused writing can help people recognize and come to terms with their feelings. Since the 1980s, studies have found that “the writing cure,” which normally involves writing about one’s feelings every day for 15 to 30 minutes, can lead to measurable physical and mental health benefits. These benefits include everything from lower stress and fewer depression symptoms to improved immune function. And there’s evidence that handwriting may better facilitate this form of therapy than typing.
A commonly cited 1999 study in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that writing about a stressful life experience by hand, as opposed to typing about it, led to higher levels of self-disclosure and translated to greater therapeutic benefits. It’s possible that these findings may not hold up among people today, many of whom grew up with computers and are more accustomed to expressing themselves via typed text. But experts who study handwriting say there’s reason to believe something is lost when people abandon the pen for the keyboard.
Psychologists have long understood that personal, emotion-focused writing can help people recognize and come to terms with their feelings.
“When we write a letter of the alphabet, we form it component stroke by component stroke, and that process of production involves pathways in the brain that go near or through parts that manage emotion,” says Virginia Berninger, a professor emerita of education at the University of Washington. Hitting a fully formed letter on a keyboard is a very different sort of task — one that doesn’t involve these same brain pathways. “It’s possible that there’s not the same connection to the emotional part of the brain” when people type, as opposed to writing in longhand, Berninger says.
Writing by hand may also improve a person’s memory for new information. A 2017 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that brain regions associated with learning are more active when people completed a task by hand, as opposed to on a keyboard. The authors of that study say writing by hand may promote “deep encoding” of new information in ways that keyboard writing does not. And other researchers have argued that writing by hand promotes learning and cognitive development in ways keyboard writing can’t match.
The fact that handwriting is a slower process than typing may be another perk, at least in some contexts. A 2014 study in the journal Psychological Science found that students who took notes in longhand tested higher on measures of learning and comprehension than students who took notes on laptops.
“The primary advantage of longhand notes was that it slowed people down,” says Daniel Oppenheimer, co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. While the students who typed could take down what they heard word for word, “people who took longhand notes could not write fast enough to take verbatim notes — instead they were forced to rephrase the content in their own words,” Oppenheimer says. “To do that, people had to think deeply about the material and actually understand the arguments. This helped them learn the material better.”
Slowing down and writing by hand may come with other advantages. Oppenheimer says that because typing is fast, it tends to cause people to employ a less diverse group of words. Writing longhand allows people more time to come up with the most appropriate word, which may facilitate better self-expression. He says there’s also speculation that longhand note-taking can help people in certain situations form closer connections. One example: “A doctor who takes notes on a patient’s symptoms by longhand may build more rapport with patients than doctors who are typing into a computer,” he says. Also, a lot Berninger’s NIH-funded work found that learning to write first in print and then in cursive helps young people develop critical reading and thinking skills.
Finally, there’s a mountain of research that suggests online forms of communication are more toxic than offline dialogue. Most of the researchers who study online communication speculate that a lack of face-to-face interaction and a sense of invisibility are to blame for the nasty and brutish quality of many online interactions. But the impersonal nature of keyboard-generated text may also, in some small way, be contributing to the observed toxicity. When a person writes by hand, they have to invest more time and energy than they would with a keyboard. And handwriting, unlike typed text, is unique to each individual. This is why people usually value a handwritten note more highly than an email or text, Berninger says. If words weren’t quite so easy to produce, it’s possible that people would treat them — and maybe each other — with a little more care.
So are music in schools, matching pitches, and rhythm exercises..
The last hope for cursive handwriting was: the Apple Newton.
Cursive gave better handwriting accuracy with faster input than printing.
Alas, “egg freckles” was cursive’s last gasp. It’s dead, it just hasn’t stopped moving yet.
Handwriting practice is also a good way to be more prepared to keep business records and continue business correspondence after, say, a nukefest—a possibility in our future. Our computing and communications infrastructure is increasingly fragile.
Interesting article. I seldom write in longhand any more. The only time I do is when I’m talking on the phone and want to record what I’m being told.
I keep a daily log on my laptop, just because it’s so easy. One of the best features is it allows me to easily search to quickly find out what happened when. Honestly, writing longhand now just feels like a chore. When communicating with people now, I usually test with my phone.
Amen to that. Our brains are too wired to these keyboards now. I can still sign my name longhand with no problem, but if I have to do something like personalize a Christmas card, my writing looks like I have some sort of palsy, and it’s frustrating. What will people be doing a generation or two from now, leaving a biometric thumbprint to say, ‘Happy Birthday’? Scanning a barcode to see what the sender typed?
-PJ
What prgram do u use to keep a daily log?
Recently I came across a handwritten letter from Mom to Grandma shortly after I was born. It goes into some detail about the way I took DC by storm on day one. Fat chance ever finding or seeing that if it were an email. Fat chance this entire post is true.
Just a basic Numbers spreadsheet on my Mac laptop. I actually prefer Excel, just because I spent of lot of time learning it, but my Windows desktop is upstairs and I’m not able to move very well these days.
and also math ... weightlifting for the brain
I have had a bunch of surgeries on my hands, and it got to the point I couldn't write more than a half a sentence before my hand began to cramp up and become claw-like, and the legibility of my once neat handwriting began to become nearly illegible.
I found a place that would make a font out of your handwriting (I think it cost about $100 15-20 years ago) and you filled out a form and sent it to them, and they would send you back a font!
I wrote one and printed one...can you tell which is which? (You probably can, but it is pretty damn close)
I rarely write anything by hand, and write all my letters and cards (yeah, I'm old school...I still write and mail things...probably a holdover from my military days where I used to write a dozen letters in a sitting) and I sent a card to a woman I used to correspond with when I was in the Navy, composing it with my font and printing it on the cards I make.
When I saw her, she remarked that she had forgotten how neat and tidy my hand writing was (this was 40 years after the fact...she still had my letters!) and was astonished when I told her it was a font that mimicked my handwriting...:)
That's the giveaway-it is a little too level and even, but the characters are faithful!
After watching Game of Thrones, I re took up letter writing, I have my Quills, fake parchment paper and my sealing wax. I write to the grand kids. They like to get the letters. I also started a journal. All in all it’s very soothing and fun. I’m not a great speller, so there’s only my manual spell check, which can go awry at a moments notice. Lol
After watching Game of Thrones, I re took up letter writing, I have my Quills, fake parchment paper and my sealing wax. I write to the grand kids. They like to get the letters. I also started a journal. All in all it’s very soothing and fun. I’m not a great speller, so there’s only my manual spell check, which can go awry at a moments notice. Lol
Bump
When the Newton came out, I jumped right on it. In my job, I had to keep little “books” in my pocket full of notes, settings, filters, instructions and such for various medical imaging I was doing. I had to be up to date and do it right every time, but sometimes you wouldn’t do something for several months, so I had thet little book I carried in my back pocket. When a setting had to be changed, out came that little black book, and eventually, it got so full and filled with cross-outs and things written in margins that I couldn’t find anything.
Right around that time, the Newton came out. I bought one immediately, and had a custom leather holster made for it. It was a good thing I wore a lab coat, because it would have been unbearably geeky to wear it around in the open!
I know others may have viewed it as a toy, or a useless/unreliable novelty, but it changed a lot of things for me. The Newton had what was called a “soup” memory, so as long as I tagged my notes with the right keywords, I could find things instantly!
At the time, that was unbelievable for me. I even got a little keyboard, and I took it to meetings. At that time, I was pretty much the only person who had something to take notes on in meetings, and people still remember that “little computer” I had.
I went through about four of them before the technology overtook it and Blackberries and those other small handheld things passed it by. But it recognized my handwriting (which was well suited to it as you can see from the post above)
I went to Palm Pilots, and went through a boatload of those, and it was not nearly as useful, even though it was more widely compatible.
I still have one of those old Newtons up in a cabinet...:)
Now, they are replacing the paper slips with little screens no larger than smart phones, and I'm supposed to sign my name with my finger. I can't get anything close to resembling my signature on those things, so I just stopped trying. Shouldn't the chip in the card be enough?
And the clerks don't seem to care, either. So in hindsight, what's the point in signing, except maybe to verify the tip amount?
-PJ
Now that there are hackers for ransom that attack businesses, many businesses are finding it is really hard for them to do mundane tasks that have to be done, like adding to files, bookkeeping, ETC. It is possible to do things old school, by hand to be recorded so it can be put in the system when the system is back up. The problem is most employees have no clue how to do things by hand on paper.
Most of the businesses are back up in a few days but it truly cripples a company to have computers down even for a few days.
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