Bring Back Handwriting: It’s Good for Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

Bring Back Handwriting: It’s Good for Your Brain

elemental.medium.com

22 pointspseudolus4 comments

Learning anything is good for your brain. Lots of other things involve sequence and symbolism. Lots of other things involve fine motor skills. Why not learn introduce something else, like knitting?

I keep Leuchtturm notebooks for capturing ideas in depth, and a stack of index cards for notes. Over time, as the notebooks fill up, they become really nice objects to keep coming back to. (And they look nice on my shelf.) The index cards are not precious, and I can scribble something down, tear it up, pin it to a board, keep them in a box for later.

I definitely agree that there's something calm about writing with a real pen or pencil on a piece of actual paper. It's tactile and satisfying. And the 'slowing down' has a very clear mental effect.

Side note: classic Montessori education starts kids with cursive, because the flowing letters are easier to start with. I got back into cursive with keeping a journal; with practice it starts to become a really nice mental/physical fit.

Considering one of the reasons I got into computers was that it was easier to write closer to the speed my brain thinks at.... nope.

In fact, I’m still waiting for that sweet neural interface that cyberpunk authors promised us 30 years ago.

Handwriting is alright for studying (as you’re forcing the brain to re-evaluate what you read, helping memorization), but for everything else it’s a complete drag.

I've found that if you're drafting something important (i.e., not transactional communication), the extra delay of handwriting enables you to edit your thoughts more effectively, more than writing something fast and then editing it on the computer. Whether this advantage justifies the extra time taken to compose the text depends on the writer. Many proflific writers still use pencil and paper to compose their manuscripts.

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