Handwriting activates broader brain networks than typing
26 comments
·April 21, 2025hintymad
y33t
I read somewhere that he even programs on paper and punches it into a computer when he's done.
As for myself, I definitely understand the problem he's describing. I catch all my fleeting thoughts with a keyboard, but I always find my mind wandering into tangents and end up losing the focus of what I'm really getting at, or I end up in a cycle of endless micro revisions. When I started writing with pen and paper it enforced a certain economy into my writing process. By having a natural speed limiter, I have to focus more on the heart of what I'm getting at; being in the zone writing with pen and paper feels totally different to me than writing on a keyboard, you get into a much deeper state of focus.
mbrumlow
I have always had the opposite problem.
In grade school had to go to all these classes during recess to get different pencils, pens, grips, wiring methods.
The reason was my hand could not keep up with my thoughts. So the result was skipped words, and merging of two words and all these other things.
I am still poor at spelling, but the solution was typing. Once I started typing well my grades went up and I no longer found doing the work a chore.
abeppu
I don't think I care about what brain activation happens while I'm writing per se -- though I may care about behavioral/performance differences. Do you think more deeply or remember better when taking notes by hand? Are you more likely to catch errors?
Here's one study that looked at unrelated word recall tasks, and didn't see convincing evidence of a difference between handwriting and typing. However, they leave open whether there are differences that arise in more complex learning environments. https://www.jowr.org/jowr/article/view/963/930
I think the higher-level, more realistic experiment I'd like to see someone do is: for a single college-level psychology class, split students into handwriting vs typing groups, and assure them that they'll all be graded on a curve within their assigned group, and see if top-level performance between the two groups differs over a term.
countingbeans
The conclusion of that article mentions that it depends on whether your deeper cognitive centers are activated. If writing by hand, the handicap of slower transcription might force the writer to summarize or paraphrase, which uses more brain activity than if you were able to type it verbatim.
That's not to say one is superior to the other. But maybe it means that technique is more important than medium.
sowbug
The study used a pen and touchscreen for the writing case, so this comment is a tangent. But there's a lot to be said for the memory-palace effect of physically placing words in a specific place on a specific piece of paper in a physical notebook. I might not perfectly remember what I wrote, but I absolutely remember where I wrote it. That's lost with digital notes.
opan
>I might not perfectly remember what I wrote, but I absolutely remember where I wrote it. That's lost with digital notes.
Digital notes are searchable, so I'd say this is a very fair trade-off. If all my notes are .txt files in a "notes" directory, even if I don't recall which file I wrote my pizza order from last week in, I can grep them all for keywords like "pizza" to find it immediately. (I can also manage the notes with SyncThing to have them on multiple PCs/phones at once)
fads_go
Maybe you are missing the point made?
For many people (and other animals), memory is tied to a specific place. The poster knows that the note they made is i.e.
red notebook on top shelf, page 12, top left corner.
Searching in digital notes doesn't give that same sense of place.
And the sense of place, plus the "path" that connects items in the space, is an important part of memory and learning.
cosmic_cheese
I wonder if this might be a situation where the spatial navigation concepts found in the original macOS would be beneficial. It leveraged the user’s spatial and muscle memory to enable quick navigation of the filesystem by giving each directory its own dedicated window with a user-defined size and screen location. The effect is very much like navigating a physical space, with each file and folder having a spatial “path” that’s effortlessly encoded in memory.
While this may not scale well to the complexity of modern filesystems, it might work well for a stylus-based digital notetaking device.
jorvi
Nothing as fanciful as a 'memory palace'.
It's more that with a physical note you aren't giving yourself permission to forget, because you can't instantly repo the information. Just like taking a photograph of a beautiful moment is detrimental to creating a memory of said moment.
Jimpulse
Mostly use obsidian, but the file and folder hierarchy with outlines feels memory palace like and on top of that the linkage and tag graphs. There is structure beyond a note floating by itself.
mbrumlow
lol!
> suggests handwriting may be irreplaceable when it comes to learning.
> For the typing condition, participants typed the same words on a keyboard using only their right index finger.
So they tested exactly nothing useful.
Give it up Mrs. Smith, the keyboard won.
In seriousness, I would always expect pressing a single button to require less brain power than drawing a complex line, even more so if the subjects have been in the digital world for the last 10 years.
Just from a pure mechanical motion finger movement of a single key being pressed at a time is far less than most of the full hand engagement wiring requires.
The study might have been better if the types used a full keyboard with both hands, but I suspect they always know the results would not be worthy to write home about.
But even they were. The task of transcribing is not all that engaging. Maybe I would have reserve brain power to do the task.
You will also have to convince me that what is measured, brain connectivity, is a metric we care about and has any real impact beyond being a fun trick.
opan
>>For the typing condition, participants typed the same words on a keyboard using only their right index finger.
>The study might have been better if the types used a full keyboard with both hands
Agreed. This reminds me of solving Rubik's cubes, where solvers employ "fingertricks" like using index finger followed by middle finger to do a U2 (two turns of the "up" face) more quickly. Similarly people often minimize "regrips" and "cube rotations" (changing which side is facing you) to improve efficiency and get times down. What it also does is result in a more specific and consistent set of motions that I think are easier to remember and execute. People will also talk about algorithms being "in their hands" to differentiate between being able to spew out the notation vs actually doing it. I've found that for several algorithms I've memorized, if I don't do them at a natural (fast) speed and the usual positioning, I can forget the moves and lose track of what I'm doing. If I had to do every turn using my whole right hand, slowly, I suspect I would struggle a lot.
jakey_2
While it's clear that the brain is more active whilst handwriting due to the fine motor control required to use a pen, I wonder if the "performance" benefits pertaining to learning some material are driven by the increase brain activation, or perhaps just by the increased amount of time spent with the material when writing something by hand. Does one encode a memory deeper by handwriting a set of words once, or by typing them 10x each?
Really interesting study, and I'm looking forward to the future study which extrapolates this to younger children and older adults.
kingofheroes
I always found handwriting notes to be more effective at getting my brain to actually remember them compared to typing. When it comes to writing though I'll always pick the keyboard.
IcyWindows
This study has been covered in HN before.
Is it really "typing" if you are only allowed to use your index finger?
inetknght
I find it interesting that typing "requires" both hands to press keys while handwriting "requires" only a single hand to write (and the other hand typically just holds the paper steady).
I think it would be interesting to compare hand dominance in writing vs typing then.
makeitdouble
FWIW people using their phone as their main computer tend to type crazy fast even with one hand.
I always wondered if they'd benefit from a bridge app that would feed the phone's input into to their desktop/laptop, like a networked keyboard
opan
Qwerty has a strong left-hand bias even if you're right-handed.
_aavaa_
Objectively poorly done study which does not come close to proving what it says it does.
Read the commentary on it publish in the same journal, it’s plain English and pretty scathing: www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517235/full
deepcurryshit
GenZ can't do cursive.
amadeuspagel
I'm sure carving letters into stone activates even broader brain networks -- and the rest of the body as well.
dboreham
I suspect this is just a side effect of the way everything the brain does "evolves" from training data over the life of the organism. If someone was never taught to write, only typing their notes and assignments, my bet is the opposite evidence would be "discovered".
Donald Knuth used to go to a secretary school to learn touch typing, and IIRC he could easily type more than 120 WPM. Yet he decided to write his books and papers first with pencil and a piece of paper, and then type them out. The reason is that he found that he typed faster than he could think, which in turn interfered with his thinking process, while writing on paper matches his speed of thinking.
I also find taking notes on paper helps me focus more than typing, but it could be just that writing slows me down so I have more time to unconsciously reflect more. I also find writing math on paper is way more effective than using a computer, but that's most likely because I'm not that familiar with LaTex, so typing out equations interrupts my thought process.