Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain
openread.academy
openread.academy
How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general? The paper only contains that one line about the matter, in the "Participants" section. (also, do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?)
Yeah, the paper claims "whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity," which is bunk given the methodology.
If you're only using one finger to type, of course you're using less brain activity to control that one finger, versus all ten.
I'm unable to read the actual paper, but from the comments here, it sure seems like they worked backwards from an existing premise ("handwriting is better than typing for retaining information") and found a way to make that "truth".
Edit: Missed the link to the article in the comments. Reading it now.
I agree with their premise provided students don't know how to touch type (given the anecdotal amount of visual typing I've seen a reason concern for students) it's also interesting that it's cursive, which is being taught less.
So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing.
Too many variables are changed between the two tests.
A) writers can see whole words vs no visual feedback B) writers use their natural writing technique (2 or 3 fingers?) vs 1.
It'd be interesting to test typing with a single hand (using words that can be entirely touch typed with one hand)
I'm surprised the choose not to gather that data.
https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2306&...
Is interesting in that it shows the opposite effect: improved recall. It also measured velocity/speed of response. Which shows writing was faster.
Another idea for a test: writing without ink.
I learned on a Mac. The course material was copying from a book without looking at the screen, then correcting the errors. This second pass to correct mistakes is different, and it's not clear that you can be removed when taking notes without affecting learning.
I regularly switch between a laptop keyboard, standard external keyboard, and ergonomic (curved/split) external keyboard, including switching between ANSI/ISO keyboard layouts (my country defaults to ISO but my MacBook has ANSI). After each switch I generally need a bit of time to adjust, and type quite a bit of errors for the first half-hour or so.
Especially when I have to type special symbols like backslash and percent, which move quite a bit between keyboards.
Out of curiosity, why so many keyboards? I work with a dude (lawyer) who takes his keyboard everywhere with him, ha.
This is how I feel as a left hander while writing the old fashioned way. I can’t see what I’m writing so I get sloppy really quickly, and always need paper with lines.
Not that this makes their methodology not totally bunk, of course.
My youngest is left handed, and his writing is just trash. I have no idea how to help him outside of specific left handed writing tools (that I'm pretty sure don't help at all).
If I had to do it over again, I would probably force myself to write right handed. It should be possible to get used to it, but that would really be a choice they have to make for themselves.
I am left-handed and my handwriting is terrible, but my partner is also left-handed and her handwriting is very nice but she position her hands as described above to "pull", so clearly it can be done if you apply yourself.
She also hand writes a lot more while I am almost exclusively typing these days so practice definitely helps.
It's traditionally written right-to-left, top-to-bottom.
Probably the same concept at play, but what helped me as a kid was getting one of those black Pentel 0.5mm engineering mechanical pencils (used to be $5 apiece or so at Staples) and using it to write everything as small as possible. On college-rule paper my lettering would occupy 25% of the vertical space while strictly adhering to the bottom line in neat rows.
Few teachers could read my writing without a magnifying glass, but they got their revenge by specifying essay lengths in number of pages. I had to do 75% more work to meet the page count.
I wasn't intentionally being an asshole with this-- in writing such tiny lettering it forced me to pay attention to clarity of my lettering to an autistic degree, otherwise my writing would be entirely illegible to the teacher and my work would be rejected.
Also, growing up in Israel, where we write right to left, I don’t recall any of my right-handed friends having issues with handwriting.
If you write with the same positioning we teach to right handers, the hand hides the writing, and if you use a fountain pen you just smear the writing before it has a chance to dry. So don’t: slant the paper, like 45 degrees counter clockwise, and position your hand above the line you’re writing. Somewhat. I’m not the leftie, I’m working from memory here.
The key idea is to keep the text visible, and keep the writing position relatively comfortable. Then it’s just down to training. Target a specific style, draw individual letters… write stuff while concentrating on the writing, not whatever you need the writing for (you can’t really practice and take notes for instance).
Mostly boring advice, that apart from slanting the paper probably applies to everyone. (Note: I also have terrible hand writing, grain of salt and all that.)
When I used to write more on paper, many moons ago, I'd turn the paper 90 degrees to the right. Many lefties curl their hands over. I never got that, I just turn the paper. The body has to compensate a little but much more natural for the wrist when writing for longer spells.
Come to think of it, I don't do it much at all now, have probably got workarounds I'm unaware of at this point. My notebook stays aligned with the desk. Perhaps a slight tilt.
Either way, experiment with moving the paper, not the wrist, and get smooth pens as mentioned elsewhere. Fountain pens from Parker used to be my go to. Gel or roller are fine though.
Good luck!
Edit: I also learned to write under the line, so didn't drag my hand through the ink. Probably due to fountain pen use forcing that. Back when blotting paper was a thing!
I've heard that in some «almost only words» fields, laptops for students (and projectors for professors) got generalized during lectures (?),
while in math-heavy fields (and I assume, anything involving frequently having to do drawings / schematics), paper for students (and blackboards for professors) were still overwhelmingly used only a few years ago, and I predict are still going to be, until both hardware (e-paper just only barely got colour now !) and software gets much, MUCH better.
but is it truly informed consent if it is written with multiple fingers?
Exactly… Most people can after training type much faster than they can write with a pen, assuming they’re allowed to use all fingers, which I’d expect to be crucial when comparing them.
> do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?
Norwegian here: No. We learned cursive in elementary school but most students switched to “block letters” in secondary school. For the past 15+ years, students have also had school computers since secondary school, so about half of their writing went digital since then. (With somewhat negative results, given the attention span of most teens…)
My impression is that my retention went way up and I had better understanding overall because I could discover the underlying patterns quicker when I was spending less time and energy encoding my thoughts into words.
People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.
That has never been the case for me -- while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer, and then am struggling to catch up, and when I finally figure out what they're explaining again, there's no more time to write it down.
But I can type faster than lecturers speak. And obviously you don't take notes verbatim either, just the gist of a sentence. Then after the seminar is over, I can go over the notes at my own pace to build my understanding. Details that didn't seem that relevant during the seminar, I suddenly realize are key.
I really don't understand why people don't talk about this advantage more.
> while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer
That's not the same kind of note-taking. The first is writing for understanding, the second is taking quick notes to avoid missing anything while the lecturer is talking.
And then by the time I figure it out, I haven't understood a bunch of previous points that depended on knowing what the variable was.
And the "quick" version is not what people claim provides any benefits of understanding.
Once I stopped taking notes, it freed up my mind to think critically about the material and helped me quickly identify when I was confused about something. When I was confused, I was able to ask the professor about it immediately instead of trying to figure it out on my own after the lecture
Not all professors want to take questions during lecture, it works fine in small classes but it can be quite disruptive in a large lecture class when you have a sylabus to stick to in a fixed number of lecture meetings.
Reminds me of the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.
He had the idea of a "trusted system" for capturing things.
Instead of anxiously carrying something important in your head, jot it down and get it off your mind.
Maybe not full notes, but maybe get ready to capture insights.
However, there's no underlying theory to anything in psychology. Psychologists come up with things they call theories, but when you look at them a bit more closely, they're 'just-so stories' that happen to fit some experimental results. The experimental results themselves are shallow correlations between inputs and outputs. Prod the brain in this specific way, and see how it responds. EEG experiments like the one linked only tell us what bits of the brain respond to what stimuli; we don't know what's actually going on in forming a response to that stimulus.
You can point to the ethics protocols by which experimenters are bound to not harm their subjects - these are important and worthy. You can point to the advertising industry's use of psychology to improve its effectiveness, but this is itself a shallow endeavour. As far as improving our understanding the brain as a physical system, the discipline of psychology is much activity with little achievement.
DOI: doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945
It looks like this was done because while handwriting is a unihemispheral activity, typing with both hands is not. But it trashes the results from a practical perspective.
I wonder what the effect would be when considering:
a) proficiency to write in cursive
b) touch typing ability
Nothing sinks in to anyones brain because they're not actually talking about it and they don't need to actually learn it for any reason in school because they can just ask the chatbot again at any moment.
i remember when maths teachers would scold me for not knowing my multiplication tables “are you going to carry a calculator around with you every day?” they would say when seeing me use one. Turns out i do.
All our maths education is based on lies which are progressively disclosed. You’re told we can’t go below zero, that numbers are integers, that you can’t take the square root of a negative number… And slowly are introduced to all those concepts building on what you learned before.
And yet this meme of “hur dur, mah teachers saids I’d haves no calculators on me but I use a phone all the time, epic fail” prevails instead of pondering for two seconds that maybe your teacher was giving a cookie-cutter argument that a literal child could comprehend but be unable to refute so they could continue with the damn lesson.
And as if people use calculators that often. They don’t. Yet being able to do some basic arithmetic is useful in such simple areas as shopping, to make more informed decisions in a world that is constantly trying to trick you.
But the impact of that is tiny compared to the prospect of future generations offloading their general ideation and critical thinking to machines instead of just number crunching.
Though in more practical economic terms, perhaps what we're being trained for is a future in which the typical worker has a low paying job sanity checking AI output rather than a higher paying job doing the work themself.
> participants were instructed to either (a) write in cursive with their right hand the presented word with a digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard.
however, in my case the blank keycaps did make the task a bit more difficult. i would write faster in cursive, and it might feel less effort.
also the reason was outlined:
> Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard to interpret the results.
btw, this post was quite frustrating to write.
Looks like this did this because "allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard to interpret the results," since handwriting is done with one hemisphere.
Still weird.
While, statistically, that may be strictly true across the population, I suspect, in the main, people who are in an educational environment where note taking is a requirement can touch type.
I don't recall meeting anyone in the modern office—irrespective of department or title—in the last 25 years who can't touch type.
If I have a lot of writing to do, I almost always write longer passages with my eyes either closed or gazing at something other than the screen. When my thought is complete I open my eyes and do a few edits on whatever typos made it through.
I also do almost all of my writing in vim, so I never have to context switch between mouse and keyboard.
OTOH, IIRC,
- EEG measures brain activation. It takes more of the brain to hand write than to type, and so it is unsurprising that there is more activation during a writing by hand activity than during a typing activity.
- Do brain connectivity or neural activation correspond to favorable outcomes?
- Synaptic pruning eliminates connectivity in the brain; and that is presumably advantageous.
- Hyperconnectivity may be regarded as a disadvantage in discussions of neurodiversity. Witness recall from a network with intentional hyperconnectivity; too distracted by spurious activations?
- That's a test of dumb recall, which is a test of trivia retention.
- Is rote memorization the pinnacle of learning? To foster creative thinking and critical thinking, is trivia recall optimization ideal?
- (Isn't it necessary to forget so much of what we've been taught in order to succeed.)
- Is spaced repetition as or more effective than hand writing at increasing recall compared to passively listening?
- With persons who have injury and/or disability that prevents them from handwriting, do they have adaptations that enable them to succeed despite "having to" type instead?
- We don't hand write software; though some schools teach coding with pen and paper (and that somewhat reduces cheating, which confounds variance in success and retention).
- We write tests for software; we can't efficiently automatedly test software for quality and correctness unless the code is typed.
- Does anything ever grade, confirm, reject, or validate handwritten notes?
- Are there studies of this that measure recall after typing, and then after handwriting, too?
Edit: A, measure, B, measure; AND: B, measure, A, measure
You would have found it, had you written it down.
Kidding aside, is this the one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42288545
When I would learn vocabulary in school for a secondary language, the teacher would always state how this is best done by writing everything by hand. I never ever saw observed that benefit and always felt that to be true for me.
So I might be delusional, or there is something else at play here.
Sometimes you just want to record the information quickly in a searchable way and forget about it until the next time you need it.
Not being able to recall something you do not want to might be a feature, and so is increasing the machine ability to recall it (as opposed to yours). Grepping text is always going to be more efficient than scanned handwritten paper notes.
Why does the more modern method have to be the bad one again?
Why is that relevant?
nerve impulse -> finger impluse -> letter typed.
Meanwhile handwriting requires fluid 3d motion of a multitude of muscles.
As for reading, definitely better to read in the train than a phone screen. As for writing, didn't try
It is demonstrated that playing piano has positive effects on neural development, a task largely analogous to typing. Learning / honing any novel skill will have that effect. If you are pushing your the limits of your knowledge or skill-set and are improving, then your brain has to be adapting to things.
If one group is simply typing characters, one at a time, using one finger, of course nothing is going on in the brain. What aspect of the brain at that point is begin challenged? If anything I'd expect this task to result in a reduction of connectivity.
I always carry a notebook/pen with me, writing/drawing helps my brain process information in a way that doesn't happen with a keyboard. Whiteboards are even better, if slightly less portable.
Flagged.
Why do I still have to painstakingly write math formulas in LaTeX instead of just writing them by hand?
Why don't we write computer code by hand instead of typing it in and struggling with encodings?
We have face/object recognition and audio recognition which is often better than humans. But handwriting recognition is still quite lacking. Are there technical reasons for that or is our monopolistic IT industry just focusing on the things nobody needs like Metaverses, Augmented Reality and Chatbots?
This is surely not a serious suggestion, right?
I hate handwriting with a passion