Do our brains work differently when we’re writing by hand as opposed to when we’re typing? Why do our brains enjoy physical activity and challenges so much? Maria Hawranek discusses these questions with Audrey van der Meer, a Norwegian neuropsychologist and neurobiologist.
Although they have made lunar landings, the internet, and modern neurological research possible, human brains thrive best under conditions that reflect the lives of our grandparents. Old-fashioned customs like walking, writing in a notebook (or tracing letters in the sand) are great for our brains. What’s more, scientific evidence suggests that these simple activities make us smarter.
Maria Hawranek: You’ve been studying brain development of fetuses, newborns, and infants for a number of years now. How did you become interested in the mechanisms of handwriting in young adults?
Audrey van der Meer: In order to be able to study newborns, we need special equipment— several electrodes sewn together in a net that you put on the subject’s head in one swift movement. That’s the only way—the old traditional EEG system would require literally gluing electrodes one by one to the baby’s scalp, and scraping their scalp a little to ensure clear contact between the surface of the skin and the electrodes or sensors. Before this special mesh was created, recording brain signals in newborns and infants was practically impossible. Of course, these nets are very expensive. We received this sizable Norwegian grant to purchase EEG nets in all sizes, from those fitting newborns to those suitable for adults. When the media reported this, curious people started writing to us, thinking that we could read people’s minds with the devices. We had to explain that it’s not that simple. These experiments need meticulous planning; we first need to decide what stimulus we want to present to the participant. i.e., what image or sound we will show them.
Eventually, the employees of the European branch of a well-known technology company contacted us. They were working on creating a 2-in-1 laptop-tablet device with a touchscreen and a digital pen that you could use to write and sketch with. They asked if we could conduct research using this device. Initially, we were reluctant—we specialized in observing babies and had never examined drawing or writing.
What convinced you?
We were assured our independence would remain intact, and we emphasized that we do not want to advertise the company in any way and we want to design our own experiments. We found an interesting article, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note-Taking,” published in 2014 by American scientists Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. They studied students watching TED talks and found half of the students took notes by hand, and the other half typed on a laptop. It turned out that those who took notes by hand remembered and learned more and they had better conceptual knowledge after the experiment than the students who took notes by using a keyboard. The American authors formulated a hypothesis about why this might be the case, although they did not conduct any brain research at all, so they had no evidence to support their hypothesis. They concluded that when you use ten fingers to type, you’re typing so quickly that you can write down literally everything that the lecturer or the presenter is saying. This gives you a false sense of security because, in reality, you’re not actually processing the incoming information, you’re just literally typing automatically and that doesn’t help when it comes to learning and remembering. On the other hand, when you take notes by hand, you have to process the information that reaches you to extract keywords, find connections between them, draw arrows, underline what is essential, and even make drawings. You actually only write down the words that are important, words that you can relate to previous knowledge that you already have, and that’s why this process is so important.
So, you decided to gather empirical evidence to validate this hypothesis. You studied young people with EEG nets on their heads. Did you also play them a TED talk?
Our first study in 2017 focused solely on students, and the second in 2020 involved twelve students and twelve teenagers. The resulting article went viral: over 166,000 people worldwide have read it so far. We wanted to explore what brain activity looks like when you draw or write by hand compared to when you type on a keyboard. However, such a study needs to be precisely constructed; it isn’t enough to put the participants in caps for half an hour and ask them to listen to a TED talk. We decided to play a game of Pictionary with the participants. Words were displayed on screens in front of them—e.g., “forest”, “family”, or “hedgehog”—and they had to type them on the keyboard, write them by hand, or draw the object with a digital pen, depending on the word. We were interested in brain activity when they did this.
And what did you find?
Our main finding was that the brain is much more active when we draw or write by hand than when we type words on a computer. Activity starts in areas at the back of the head, responsible, among other things, for vision. Then it progresses all the way up to the top of the head, where the part integrating motor and sensory signals responsible for the sense of time and action planning lies. Thus, almost the entire back of the brain is active when using a pen—regardless of whether it is a traditional or digital pen. When you type, there is much less brain activity. We believe that this happens because when typing, our movements are small and very similar to each other, so the brain does not have to process much. In contrast, drawing or writing involves a variety of movements and a more extensive range of stimuli. This makes the brain much more involved.
In doing so, you use different senses: you hear the sound of the pen or stylus, you feel the pressure of your hand on the pen. This could explain why children who first learned to write on a keyboard often have difficulty with letter recognition later on. French scientist Marieke Longcamp has conducted several studies showing that movement plays a key role in the representation of letters, so handwriting contributes to their visual recognition. Longcamp studied, for example, four- and five-year-old children who recognized letters better after handwriting training than after typing training.
In the Western world, we have this tendency to think about the mind as separate from the body, as somewhat independent. You often emphasize that a variety of multisensorial, embodied experiences are important to the development of young brains.
In the West, we tend to say that we have a brain to think and feel, but in my mind, we have a brain to control our behavior and our movements. Movement is our only way of interacting with the world—whether it’s getting food or catching the waiter’s attention. All communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is mediated by the motor system. The more we involve it in our daily lives, the better for the brain.
Do we need to move in order to think properly?
You could put it that way. We have to move and use all our senses to make sense of the world and therefore understand it. Our brains did not evolve to think and feel, but to control our movements. Instead of saying: “We are our brains,” I prefer to say, “We are our bodies.” And movement is the language of the brain. The more you take the movement component away from our daily tasks, the less the brain is involved. The networks that aren’t being used will then disappear and make space for networks that are being used—your brain literally becomes smaller if you’re not using it for what it’s evolved to do for over thousands of years
How does the now common belief—especially popular after the pandemic—that today’s schools should use technology as much as possible relate to this? Your research casts doubt on this.
There has been a powerful trend in Norway to move towards the complete digitalization of schools. When five- or six-year-olds start primary school, they are given a computer or an iPad by the school on the first day. They work on it all day and then have to take it home to do their homework. On top of that, let’s add some computer games or watching TV, and in this way the still-young child spends an enormous amount of time in front of a screen. The main goal for Norwegian and Finnish schools is to make children digitally competent. We think this is our priority task. Of course, it is important, because we live in a digital world. Anyway, we are not at all advocating a return to the Stone Age: our research only makes it clear that, for the sake of a child’s development, we should encourage them to write and draw by hand, to practice unique movement patterns, to use all their senses as much as possible and to use their brain in the way it was meant to be used. So, following the 2020 article, we recommended setting a minimum time for handwriting in Norwegian schools. So far, it hasn’t been taken into account.
Are digital competences really that important in the first years of a child’s life?
In Norway, more and more parents are asking this. Shouldn’t children instead be taught reflection skills and longer moments of concentration? Some toddlers can turn on an app, which fills their parents with great pride. But if you think about it, this is no real skill, rather a minor technical skill. You don’t become digitally competent from someone giving you an iPad and telling you to use it.
I hear a lot of frustrated teachers saying that currently, five- and six-year-olds can barely hold a pencil. In their short lives, they have never or rarely colored, put puzzles together, etc. This is why it is important to train fine motor skills preschoolers already have by encouraging them to do puzzles, draw, color, make beads, embroider etc. If children are not trained this way to have the necessary early childhood fine motor skills, then handwriting becomes more difficult for them than it would be by nature. And we should train them in these skills because, after all, we want our children to be able to handwrite a shopping list or a love letter in the future. It is part of our culture and heritage. Besides, it is the parents who should care most about ensuring that children’s brains are comprehensively stimulated and develop properly. This is why it is necessary to start with handwriting in lessons.
Still, not all handwriting is developmental. Many schools are old-fashioned and still you can find teachers who would expect children to write down everything they say, and they give lectures instead of providing rich and experimental classes. Nothing comes of this.
It is true. The best thing to do is to take visual notes or mind maps, i.e., write down keywords, make drawings—I was talking about this at the beginning. However, this requires having something to write on. Sometimes students who have missed a lecture ask a colleague to borrow their notes. If they have been handwritten, they are usually of no use to someone else. You take notes in relation to the knowledge you already have—the words you use are your words. You are the only one who understands certain drawings and markings.
Indeed, at university I actually preferred to go to a boring lecture than to read notes taken by someone else.
That’s right! Of course, if you’re writing a long text or a book, it’s best to do it on a keyboard. But when you’re taking notes in a lecture to learn something, then it’s definitely better to use a pen, even an electronic one.
But is it about taking notes, or rather just moving your hand during a lecture? A lot of people don’t take notes, they just draw something, even if it’s just silly drawings. Does this help you remember what you are listening to?
Handwritten notes are more effective because we cannot write down everything the lecturer says, so instead we have to process the information by summarizing it, writing down keywords, sketching small drawings, using arrows or underlining important words. In essence, we make the material our own by referring to things we already know. This is why the most recommended note-taking strategy is visual note-taking. This method involves encouraging small drawings, boxes, bubbles, or arrows in addition to taking written notes. Mindless drawing while listening is something completely different and is not related to note-taking. But yes, it does help to focus on what we are listening to and thus can facilitate memorization.
What about calligraphy training? In the past, teachers were very strict about judging students’ handwriting. Do you see the point in working on a perfectly rounded B?
This is a bit outdated. Nowadays, if you write on a touchscreen, you can enable the option to write in the form of letters from the keyboard, so there is no need for children to go through the tedious process of calligraphing hundreds of Bs. Nevertheless, to be able to write at all, you need to practice it. This is a really difficult task and can be frustrating for five- or six-year-olds, who are sometimes hyperactive. In fact, this was one of the arguments for introducing the keyboard as early as in the first grade, so that children could express themselves in writing earlier without having to go through the arduous process of learning how to write by hand. It was supposed to motivate them. I can see the advantages of this, although at the same time it is clear to me that we should teach them handwriting because it stimulates the brain wonderfully.
Our brains do like a challenge.
Yes, if we make this activity too easy for a child, requiring them only to tap on the keyboard, we are giving up on stimulating their brains. Consider the huge area of this organ that is active during handwriting or drawing, which implies communication between its various active parts. The brain achieves this by oscillating the brain cells, a kind of swinging. They can oscillate synchronously or asynchronously at different frequencies. Synchronized oscillations (neurons oscillating synchronously) at high frequencies in the occipital, parietal and central parts of the brain, which we have observed when drawing and handwriting—but not when typing—are beneficial for learning and remembering. In this special, harmonious state that the act of writing puts the brain into, the processes of learning and remembering are triggered. It is critically important for the young, developing brain to be in this state as often as possible, so that the learning and memory centers develop to their full potential.
Over a hundred years ago, Maria Montessori showed great intuition about how our brains work. She noted, among other things, that three- to four-year-old children can learn to read and write on their own if given the opportunity. You say that even two-year-olds can learn to read. Do you encourage such stimulation?
I encourage providing children with as rich and varied experiences as possible. It is not difficult to teach a two-year-old to swim or read, the child just needs to have access to water and letters. Some toddlers are immensely curious about letters, they quickly catch on to which letters correspond to which sounds; they realize that words are formed from letters, and this is how they learn to read on their own. I remember when we were going on a car trip in Norway and my five-year-old son asked, “Why do people keep misspelling the word ‘hotel’? It says ‘motel’ everywhere.” He hasn’t started school yet, and he has already made this observation. There is no need for parents or teachers to wait until a child’s brain has reached a certain level of maturity, because a baby’s brain is ready to learn from day one. It is our job to provide the child with as many opportunities for learning as possible without forcing them and without pushing them.
Is there any research on the beneficial effects of diary writing on the brain?
I don’t know much about existing research but keeping diaries always reminds me a little bit of slow cooking, slow living—this is becoming more and more popular and I think it’s because writing by hand takes time, and it helps you to organize and structure your thoughts, like you were saying. The process of writing takes longer and that’s good for the brain, and it also helps you to understand more of your inner feelings. Keeping diaries reminds me a bit of quietly, slowly cooking a meal. It takes time, helps you organize your thoughts and structure your experiences. It’s good for the brain and serves to better understand one’s inner self. This seems to me to be particularly valuable in the hectic world to which we have become so accustomed.
Audrey van der Meer
A Dutch-Norwegian scientist, van der Meer is a neuroscientist and Professor of Neuropsychology at the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She researches human development from a life-span perspective, looking at the underlying priciples that guide development, learning, and cognitive aging.
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