29/10/2019
Recent theories in psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and neuroscience – commonly referred to as “embodied cognition” – indicate that and action are closely connected and, indeed, reciprocally dependent.
Writing by hand can improve a person’s . A 2017 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that regions associated with are more active when people completed a task by hand, as opposed to on a keyboard. Using EEGs to study electrical brain activity, the authors of the study observed that when describing words using a keyboard, upper alpha/beta/gamma range activity in the central and frontal brain regions were observed, especially during the ideation phase. The authors of the study say writing by hand may promote “deep encoding” of new information in ways that keyboard writing does not.
Other researchers have posited that writing by hand promotes learning and development in ways keyboard writing can’t match. Slowing down, as required when writing by hand, also has many advantages. Because typing is fast, it tends to cause people to employ a less diverse group of words. Research also suggests that when laptops are used to take notes, they may be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. A 2014 study in the journal Psychological Science found that students who took notes in longhand tested higher on measures of learning and than students who took notes on laptops. 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,” says Daniel Oppenheimer, co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. “To do that, people had to think deeply about the material and actually understand the arguments. This helped them learn the material better.”
It also seems that there’s not the same to the part of the brain when people type, as opposed to writing in longhand. “When we 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 ,” 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. Berninger’s NIH-funded work has also found that learning to write first in print and then in cursive helps young people develop critical reading and thinking skills.
Psychologists have long understood the powerful effects of writing on the human brain. Personal, emotion-focused writing can help people recognise 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 and fewer symptoms to improved 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.
Longhand note-taking can help people in certain situations form closer connections. One example is that “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,” says Oppenheimer. And the impersonal nature of keyboard-generated text may also, in some small way, be contributing to the observed toxicity of online and mean behaviour. 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.
There are so many reasons why handwriting and using longhand to formulate our communications, and those of our family, is good for learning, thought processing and the betterment of the social fabric we exist in. Let’s hope that good old-fashioned handwriting makes a comeback and never becomes an extinct art form.
https://link.medium.com/fNa9dFyF50
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422512/
https://www.intechopen.com/books/advances-in-haptics/digitizing-literacy-reflections-on-the-haptics-of-writing
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614524581
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Louise_Sundararajan/publication/286188297_Language_emotion_and_health_A_semiotic_perspective_on_the_writing_cure/links/56d9ed2b08aebe4638bb9ca1/Language-emotion-and-health-A-semiotic-perspective-on-the-writing-cure.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1023/A:1024736828322
