by Typing may be faster than writing by hand, but it’s less stimulating for the brain, according to research published Friday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
After recording the brain activity of 36 university students, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology determined that handwriting can improve learning and memory.
At the beginning of the experiment, the students were told to write words in a cursor with a digital pen on a touch screen, or to type the same words with a keyboard. When a word such as “forest” or “hedgehog” appeared on a screen in front of them, they had 25 seconds to write or type it over and over again.
Meanwhile, a cap of sensors on his head measured their brain waves. The cap’s 256 electrodes were attached to the scalp and recorded the electrical signals of the students’ brains, including where brain cells were active and how parts of the brain communicated with each other.
“Our main finding was that handwriting activates almost the entire brain compared to typing, which barely activates the brain. The brain is less challenged when pressing keys on a keyboard than when forming those letters by hand,” said Audrey van der Meer, co-author of the study and professor of neuropsychology at NTNU.
In particular, the study found that handwriting required communication between the brain’s visual, sensory and motor cortices. People writing with the digital pen had to imagine letters, then use their fine motor skills to control their movement as they wrote.
“When you have to form letters by hand, ‘A’ looks completely different than ‘B’ and requires a completely different movement pattern,” said van der Meer.
In contrast, when typing, the keys look mostly the same, regardless of the letter. As a result, the study found that typing required less brain activity in the visual and motor cortices.
“Because only small parts of the brain are active during typing, the brain does not need to communicate between different areas,” said van der Meer.
Van der Meer’s previous research on children and young adults also found that people’s brains are more active when writing by hand than when typing. A 2017 study from Indiana University also showed that writing by hand can connect visual and motor skills, which can help children better recognize letters.
But so far, there’s mixed evidence about whether taking paper notes versus a laptop helps people remember and better understand information in the classroom or boosts their performance on tests.
It’s also hard to know whether or how brain activity in the new study might translate into real-life improvements in learning or memory, said Ramesh Balasubramaniam, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced, who was not involved in the research.
The study showed that when students write by hand, “many of the connections are occurring from the frontal and temporal regions of the brain, which are more associated with memory,” he said. But a future study could “test the participants for what they remember from what they wrote and what they typed.”
Balasubramaniam said that older adults may see cognitive benefits from handwriting, “but I think the biggest benefits are when the brain is still developing, because it’s like concurrent with other big learning processes that are happening .”
In the United States, the Common Core set of academic standards, adopted by most states, calls for children to learn handwriting in kindergarten and first grade. It also sets typing milestones for fourth, fifth and sixth grades.
“Children are currently being taught calligraphy. They will always be taught handwriting. How they actually use handwriting is going to be a combination of their own personal preferences and then the expectations of the classrooms they’re in,” said Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of education at USC’s Rossier School of Education.
Writing by hand can be more beneficial for some children than others, he said.
“Some kids may have fine motor issues, so handwriting will be a challenge for them,” Polikoff said. On the other hand, “there is some evidence that handwriting, especially cursive handwriting, works especially for students with dyslexia.”
The US has seen some political pressure to require cursive in schools. California, for example, passed a law last year mandating that public school teachers provide some cursive instruction from first through sixth grade. Polikoff estimated that about 20 states have some form of cursive requirement.
But scientists don’t know if cursive offers any additional cognitive benefits over writing in print.
Polikoff said some people support teaching cursive simply because historical documents were written that way, people traditionally sign their names in cursive or simply because it’s “a dying beautiful art.”
On the other hand, van der Meer said that she is “often accused of trying to go back to the Stone Age” by supporting students to write by hand in schools. Handwriting and typing should have a place in the classroom, she said.
“We live in a digital world and the digital world is here to stay,” said van der Meer. “If you have to write a long essay or a long text, it’s obviously much better to use a computer.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
