First, Happy Easter, while I am completely aware of how late for most it is, I spent most of the day helping my mother around, since a large portion of the family came to visit us (my grandmother lives with us).
If you are not religious, you still can appreciate other people’s happiness and their celebration, the comfort they find in their beliefs. If you don’t celebrate Easter, I hope you had a splendid and cheerful Sunday. For those who celebrate it:
Happy Easter !
May anyone use this moment to gather strength, revisit older sources of knowledge and wisdom, and give yourself a little moment of peace, hope, and quietude, most need that from time to time.
As some, or most of you will know I am a huge fountain pen and paper lover (I was also an “artist”, you can see some of my drawings with the credits for the inspiration in this very old article), to me nothing supersedes traditional media, that is why I love absurdly detailed pencil pieces so much. Not only do I appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into anything made by hand, be it a pen, leather, paper itself, or ink, but to me, there was always a connection that we miss with digital forms of writing and notetaking.
Of course, given my previous line of work, and some of my research into specific fields, pen and paper possess a degree of security borderline impossible to achieve with electronic means. After all, wait enough years, you can break encryption, hack a system, or something else. You can’t hack paper though =). I also have a deep interest in learning calligraphy, there is something quintessential about beautiful writing.
So. Here is an incentive for you to remember more, learn more, and make more connections. Write on paper. Now backed by science.
Writing by hand may increase brain connectivity more than typing on a keyboard
“We show that when writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns are far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard,” said Prof Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and co-author of the study published in Frontiers in Psychology. “Such widespread brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, is beneficial for learning.”
The pen is mightier than the (key)board
The researchers collected EEG data from 36 university students who were repeatedly prompted to either write or type a word that appeared on a screen. When writing, they used a digital pen to write in cursive directly on a touchscreen. When typing they used a single finger to press keys on a keyboard. High-density EEGs, which measure electrical activity in the brain using 256 small sensors sewn in a net and placed over the head, were recorded for five seconds for every prompt.
Connectivity of different brain regions increased when participants wrote by hand, but not when they typed. “Our findings suggest that visual and movement information obtained through precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning,” van der Meer said.
Movement for memory
Although the participants used digital pens for handwriting, the researchers said that the results are expected to be the same when using a real pen on paper. “We have shown that the differences in brain activity are related to the careful forming of the letters when writing by hand while making more use of the senses,” van der Meer explained. Since it is the movement of the fingers carried out when forming letters that promotes brain connectivity, writing in print is also expected to have similar benefits for learning as cursive writing.
On the contrary, the simple movement of hitting a key with the same finger repeatedly is less stimulating for the brain. “This also explains why children who have learned to write and read on a tablet, can have difficulty differentiating between letters that are mirror images of each other, such as ‘b’ and ‘d’. They literally haven’t felt with their bodies what it feels like to produce those letters,” van der Meer said.
The physical pen on paper is mightier than the tablet. I also believe writing by hand abrogates the mental laziness that a large number of people develop by using digital shortcuts, which is increasing at a steady pace with the widespread use of AI, and while I am pro-AI, it will create a colossal number of intellectually and cognitively lazy people, you can already see it in certain communities that are hard users of AI (coding being the one at the forefront, followed by other tech jobs).
It is one of the main reasons I have suggested to any reader who wants to either learn or learn more and remember the complicated subjects they may read about, to use pen/pencil and paper. Or just have a better functioning brain. Also while I appreciate fountain pens, you don’t need anything fancy, or fancy paper, just the physical act of writing.
I have shared this notebook and one of the pens before, but I feel obligated to do so again, these are two of my 3 favorite pens, and these were a gift from a very generous reader, God bless that person. The notebook is a “Midori-styled” traveler’s notebook, a Japanese brand that took the world by storm, and also a gift with the alias I earned in my past life (my name here, and on Twitter).
God bless all of you and have a great week.
There is this country that stopped using tablets for children in class in favor of pen and paper... i should have written the country :p
Interesting about writing. I've often wondered, seeing images of students in classrooms staring at screens with or without keyboards how they learn and retain anything. Physical note taking with a pencil and paper was integral to the learning, at least when the instructors bothered to present something that was not simply reiterating a textbook.
It's only a matter of time before AI infiltrates healthcare and the practice of medicine. It will be interesting to observe the mental lethargy and the consequences when that time arrives.