Every time you invent a technology,
you also invent a responsibility.
—Aza Raskin, Co-founder
Earth Species Project
As someone who does a lot of thinking, values thinking, and does quite a bit of thinking about thinking, it can be hard sometimes to look at the general state of thinking in our society and not become demoralized. When 20% of voters believe President Biden is responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion in this country, it can look like the conspiracy theorists have won. When a third of those aged 18-29 are getting 100% of their “news” from TikTok, it is little wonder that half the nation remains convinced that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been in 50 years (despite being at a near record low). And when we have people forming intimate relationships with AI companions rather than fellow human beings (at great risk to your national security it turns out), it can simply feel like it is time to toss hands in the air and start researching survivalist bunkers on-line.
Furthermore, adding fuel to all this has been one of my classes this academic year in which I have observed almost no collective intellectual growth from last September to today—something I have never witnessed in my now 35-year career. And lest I be accused of subjective bias, I am not alone in this empirical observation; the grade-level dean and others at my school are concerned by what we have failed to see happen over the past 9 months in so many of these students’ courses.
With one exception: math. Math classes have all seen growth—sometimes simply COVID recovery—but growth nonetheless and across the board at all levels.
Why?
My hypothesis is based on an observation. There were, of course, individual exceptions in my class in terms of growth over the year, and when identifying what both the act of learning math and these individual growth exceptions have in common, it is one thing: writing by hand. My students in my biology class that grew intellectually over the year completed all their work by hand—just as they would have had no choice but to do in their math courses; you can’t readily manipulate equations on a screen.
The science behind my hypothesis is pretty solid and grows with each new study. We have known since 2014 from research done at Princeton University that students who take notes by hand do demonstrably better on tests than student who only type their notes on a laptop. But recently, using fMRI to perform brain scans, we are discovering what is actually different in the brain between handwriting and typing and why writing by hand is so central to better learning outcomes. For starters, handwriting produces significantly higher levels of electrical activity across many more interconnected brain regions than typing does—perhaps most significantly in the motor cortex. While typing and handwriting both employ movements in your hands and fingers to generate words, writing by hand demands significantly more communication between the motor cortex and visual cortex, engaging the brain more deeply as it must constantly align each finger’s position with the mental models of the letters and words being written. Put simply, as neuropsychologist Audrey van der Meer says, “when you are typing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily feeling of producing an A is entirely different from producing a B.”
The implications for younger children are profound. Those, for example, who learn to trace out the alphabet by hand have significantly better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of words, which when combined with the improvement in memory and recall handwriting produces, leads to better reading skills—the very foundation of all education. As van der Meer puts it, “if young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won’t reach their full potential”—with all the scary possible long-term consequences that can come from that. It is, perhaps, why several states are passing laws to require handwriting lessons again in elementary schools and why California is going so far as to require training in cursive once more.
But it is not just the youngest who benefit from writing by hand. Having laid a foundation of literacy through the handwritten word, older children and adults who continue this practice have a better understanding of whatever material they are studying because the act of writing by hand causes the brain to engage with said material more intensely (their brains are literally working harder at the task). Thus, note taking with pencil, pen, or stylus (it is the physical motion that counts) leads to significantly richer, deeper learning as well as better memory formation and recall, and it is why, though I compose using a keyboard, I still always outline my thoughts for these essays by hand:
It is the only way I can assure that I am presenting my best thinking.
Which brings me back to my class that doesn’t seem to have demonstrated any collective growth this year and a world in which good thinking seems in short supply. I have watched for over a decade now as many individuals—and especially my students—have increasingly off-loaded cognitive tasks to their digital devices (taking a picture of something, for example, rather than trying to remember it), and I am left wondering if we have not reached a critical tipping point in that process. Yadurshana Sivashankar of the University of Waterloo in Ontario reminds us that “if we’re not actively using these areas (those involved in these cognitive tasks), then they are going to deteriorate over time, whether it’s memory or motor skills,” and my ah-ha moment with this particular class came when I recently had them correct a quiz in my presence rather than as homework. Instead of looking back at their notes to work out what they had done wrong, nearly all of them simply googled their questions and wrote down verbatim what appeared on their screens. It was not about learning from mistakes (or learning at all, for that matter); it was about completing a task and checking off a “to-do” box.
Well, that is something I can try to change as an educator. Starting next year, no more off-loading. Just a really, really big supply of paper, pencils, and pens, and a lot of higher quality thinking. Together, we’ll all write by hand.
References
Campbell, R.M. (Dec. 2023) “AI Chatbots Could Weaken National Security.” Scientific American, pp. 73-74.
Glueck, K. & Corasaniti, N. (May 28, 2024) Eyeing Trump, but on the Fence: How Tuned-Out Voters Could Decide 2024. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/politics/trump-biden-voters.html.
Hu, C. (May 2024) Hand-on: Writing by Hand Comes with Learning Benefits. Scientific American, p. 13.
Lambert, J. (May 11, 2024) Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing for Thinking and Learning. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain.
Mueller, P. & Oppenheimer, D. (April 23, 2014) The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614524581.
Plait, P. (Dec. 2023) “Conspiracy Theories Then and Now” Scientific American, pp. 80-81.
Light a Candle 