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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I'll hypothesize this is a bad thing, not a good thing.

When I type, it's effortless and I can type almost as fast as I can think -- so I'm using my brain efficiently.

When I write by hand, I hate it. I have to pay attention to how I'm holding the pen, if it's legible, if I have room for the next word on the line, if I'm going to smudge something, if I can keep up with what's being said or just cross this sentence out and write the next one before I forget that one too.

So sure, my brain is way more engaged when I'm writing by hand. But it's engaged in a bunch of BS related to writing, not the subject at hand. If anything, it's making it harder for me to pay attention, which (at least for me) is definitely detrimental.

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I guess that it varies from person to person. To me, writing definitely makes me remember better and more clearly whatever I write. There is something deliberate, something about the additional time that it takes to write as opposed to type, that somehow cements the material much better. Even the associations that I'm running in my mind at the time seem to be easier to remember, weeks later.

When I'm studying anything, I've found time after time that writing a summary of the lesson is one of the best ways to remember everything afterwards. Usually I don't even read it afterwards, since the benefit comes from the writing process. YMMV.

I don't think this conflicts with the OP premise. Making something take longer/be harder is a common trick to help you learn something. Like reading out loud helps you remember what you read more than just reading silently in your head. That doesn't mean that in cases where you are not trying to learn that typing would be better as using less mental energy means you have more to spare for other uses.

> Making something take longer/be harder is a common trick to help you learn something.

Honestly, this also describes gaslighting. Creating artificial barriers of discouragement is a terrible learning method for me.

With time you start to develop your own short hand, skipping words, focusing on questions to ask yourself when reviewing notes. You can often write many words without looking at the paper. Embrace the messy and ugly writing. Legibility only matters in that you can still read it.

I still want to learn cursive but my handwriting style uses plenty of flourishes that mimic cursive. Or writing words that are nearly illegible but easy to know in context.

But then you go back to engaging the brain less, so why not type?

Yes, if increasing the brain activities is the goal, our hand writing tool should be brush. Or even better, we can increase the brain workload by introducing the artificial burden like pen refuse to emit ink if its sensor doesn't recognize accurate stroke movements or as ridiculous as forcing pen holder to performing one hand juggling with the other hand.

Counter hypothesis: handwriting is like free weights in that different areas of your brain are engaged at once. As a result there are more pathways created or augmented than when typing.

There’s similar benefit and issues too. Typing is faster therefore better at capturing current facts. But worse for overall muscle development.

This is probably more of an argument against taking broadly-stated descriptive statements from studies and uncritically turning them into prescriptive statements.

You and I both find that our brains are more engaged when writing by hand. For you that engagement is a distraction from the subject at hand; for me that engagement actually helps me focus on the subject at hand. Its interesting that our personal experiences line up with the study's findings, but neither of us should probably change our habits over it.

I think the fact that handwriting is more challenging than typing is why it’s better. Your brain isn’t just engaged with the BS related to handwriting; it has to compress information on the fly in order to overcome this BS and still keep up with the speaker, which embeds an understanding of the content in your brain while you write. When you type, you can transcribe all of the info, but none of it resides in your brain afterwards.

I don't think you can do literal transciption typing without learning something like stenotype, so you'll still have to filter and summarize things.

This perfectly describes my writing experience.

Had keyboards not come along, I'd of gone to my grave having had almost no textual interaction at all.

It's been shown that people taking notes by hand during a lecture retain more than people who take notes by typing.

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