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NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY
Published: 06 April 2022
doi: 10.3389/frym.2022.623953
WHY HANDWRITING IS GOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN
Daniel J. Plebanek †and Karin H. James *
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, United States
YOUNG REVIEWER:
ROSA
AGE: 11
As laptops and tablets become more popular, handwriting is slowly
fading away. While new technology has many benefits such as
helping us stay connected with each other and allowing us to quickly
search for information, activities such as printing our letters by hand
may help the brain learn. There are many potential reasons for this.
When people write letters by hand, they: (1) actively see and feel the
letter being written; (2) see several dierent versions of that letter;
and (3) pay more attention to what they are doing. In this article,
you will learn about how handwriting helps us learn symbols and
aids in remembering information. You will also learn how your brain
responds when you write by hand compared with when you type.
Handwriting is still important, even if most of how we communicate
these days is through a keyboard or touchscreen.
LETTERS ARE SYMBOLS
There you were, sitting in a classroom, practicing writing letters and
words. Maybe you were printing them, or maybe you were learning
cursive. But at some point, you probably asked yourself, “Why do I
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Plebanek and James Handwriting and the Brain
need to know how to write when all I need is to press the keys on
a computer or tablet?” Well, in short, writing by hand helps you to
learn a set of symbols more easily and also helps you remember the
information that you write down! Using a keyboard just does not help
you with these tasks as much as writing by hand does. In fact, some
researchers think that typing actually makes learning harder! Let us
take a closer look at these two situations.
Letters are symbols, because you can not know what they mean just by
SYMBOLS
A mark or character
used as a
representation of an
object, process or
function.
what they look like. For example, the symbol ξis probably unfamiliar to
you. What does it mean? Can you tell just by looking at it? No, you need
someone to tell you what it means. Symbols can be confusing because
many of them have names (like the letter “A”) and they also have sounds
(like the sound the letter “A” makes in the word “cat”). Also, the sound of
a symbol can change depending on the other symbols around it—the
“A” sound in “cat” is dierent from the “A” sound in “cake.” To make
things even more confusing, the way symbols look can change a lot.
For example, these are all dierent versions of the letter “A:” A, a, ,
, , . Even though you now know that these symbols are all the
same letter, when you first learned the alphabet, your brain did not
know this! It probably took a while for you to learn that these symbols
are all the letter “A.” What is especially interesting is that showing your
brain these dierent examples of the same symbol helps it learn to
understand this symbol.
LEARNING SYMBOLS
Now let us think about and printing and writing. Do you remember
what your printing looked like when you first started to write? Maybe
your parents have kept some examples of your early writing, or maybe
you have seen a 5-year old try to write something. Beginner printing
is usually very messy, and sometimes we can not even tell what the
letters are (Figure 1). Also, when learning to write letters, the shape
of each letter can change each time a child tries to write it! But
remember what we just told you: seeing dierent examples of a letter
actually helps the brain learn! This means that every time a child sees
a letter that looks a little dierent but still has the same name, it helps
the child’s brain to learn that letter. One experiment showed this by
asking children to learn a brand new alphabet: the Greek alphabet.
The children were asked to print Greek symbols (λ,π,Ω,Ψ) by hand,
or type them. After they practiced printing or typing the symbols,
researchers showed the children random symbols and asked them
whether they had seen the symbols before. The children who printed
the symbols remembered them much better than the children who
typed the symbols did [1]. This simple study showed that printing the
symbols by hand helped the children learn them.
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Figure 1
Figure 1
Examples of
handwritten letters of
preschool children,
aged 4–5 years old.
Printing at this stage is
generally pretty messy,
and sometimes we can
not even tell what the
letters are.
WATCHING THE BRAIN LEARN
Now you might be wondering how we know what is going on in the
brain when children are learning symbols. That is where brain imaging
comes in. Using an amazing technology called functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), we can see what is happening inside the
FUNCTIONAL
MAGNETIC
RESONANCE
IMAGING (FMRI)
A safe, non-invasive
method that uses a
giant magnet to look at
the activity in the brain
while an individual is
performing a task.
brain while it is learning. fMRI is kind of like an X-ray except that, instead
of seeing bones, we can see brain activity. The fMRI scanner lets us see
the areas of the brain that are active [2]. In a way, fMRI takes videos of
the brain while a person is doing something. Let us say we wanted
to see what happens in the brain of a person who is printing symbols
compared with typing them. We could put a person in a fMRI scanner
(Figure 2) and ask the person to look at letters and either print them
or type them while inside the scanner. Alternatively, we could have
people learn symbols, either by printing them or typing them, and
then show them pictures of those symbols while they are in the fMRI
scanner. We can see the brain learning by recording the brain’s activity
before the people learn the symbols and after they learn the symbols,
to see what changes. A few experiments have shown that the brain
only recognizes symbols that it learned if they were printed by hand,
not if they were typed (Figure 3) [3]. This does not mean that the brain
can not learn typed letters: of course it can! But the brain learns letters
that are written by hand much more quickly than those that are typed.
So, when we are learning new letters math symbols, or other symbols,
it is much better to print them by hand than to type them.
We do not know exactly why we learn handwritten symbols better
than typed ones, but some researchers think it is because of the small
dierences in a symbol that happen when we write it several times, as
we explained before. But it could also be that it takes more attention to
produce a symbol by hand than to simply press a key. It is also possible
that creating symbols one stroke at a time helps us understand how the
lines of the symbol go together, and this helps us to learn the symbol
[4]. Researchers are very busy trying to figure out why handwriting is
better than typing for learning new symbols. Hopefully we will know
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Plebanek and James Handwriting and the Brain
Figure 2
Figure 2
A 4-year old child being
put into a fMRI scanner
to measure brain
activity.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The region of the brain
in 5 year-old children
that responds more to
handwritten letters
than typed letters.
the answer soon! But you already know your letters, and if you are not
trying to learn a new alphabet, how can writing by hand help you?
WRITING BY HAND HELPS YOU REMEMBER
If you ask your grandparents, or even your parents, how they
remember a shopping list, they will probably say they write it down.
Sometimes we type our shopping lists into our phones and refer to
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them while shopping. But what if your phone lost power in the grocery
store, or if you lost the sheet of paper that you wrote your list on?
Research has shown that if you wrote the list by hand, you would
remember it better than if you typed it on your phone [5]! And that
is just shopping lists—what if you must remember a whole bunch
of boring stu that your teacher is telling you in class? Research on
college students showed that they remembered more information
from a lecture if they took notes by hand than if they typed them [6].
So, we know that, not only do we learn symbols better by writing them,
but we also remember information better if we write it down by hand.
Why does this happen? Surely it is quicker to type information during
a lecture than to write it down, right? But speed may be the problem!
When we type information, we tend to type exactly what the teacher
is saying, without thinking about it. Writing by hand takes longer, so we
can not record everything the teacher says. When writing, we tend to
put things into our own words or summarize what the teacher says.
Putting ideas in our own words or summarizing them requires that
we think about the material as we write it down, and this takes more
attention. In a way, taking notes by hand is a way of studying while we
are learning! That makes things a lot easier when we must go back and
study that material for a test, because we already know the material
better than if we had typed it.
In summary, writing by hand can help you learn new things like
symbols and alphabets, but it also allows you to remember information
better than if you typed it. It does not matter how you write—printing,
cursive, abbreviations, it just matters that you write by hand. So, keep
writing! And remember, it does not matter if its messy—sometimes that
is even better!
FUNDING
National Institute of Health 2T32 grant #HD007475-21. The research
outlined here was partially supported by the Indiana University Oce
of the Vice President for Research Emerging Area of Research Initiative,
Learning: Brains, Machines, and Children.
REFERENCES
1. Li, J. X., and James, K. H. 2016. Handwriting generates variable visual output to
facilitate symbol learning. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 145, 298–313. doi: 10.1037/xge
0000134
2. Vinci-Booher, S., James, T. W., and James, K. H. 2016. Visual-motor functional
connectivity in preschool children emerges after handwriting experience. Trends
Neurosci. Educ. 5, 107–120. doi: 10.1016/j.tine.2016.07.006
3. James, K. H., and Engelhardt, L. 2012. The eects of handwriting experience on
functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends Neurosci. Educ. 1,
32–42. doi: 10.1016/j.tine.2012.08.001
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4. James, K.H. 2017. The importance of handwriting experience on the
development of the literate brain. Curr. Direct. Psychol. Sci. 26, 502–508.
doi: 10.1177/0963721417709821
5. Smoker, T. J., Murphy, C. E., and Rockwell, A. K. 2009. “Comparing memory for
handwriting versus typing,” in Proceedings of the Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, Vol. 53 (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE
Publications), 1744–1747. doi: 10.1177/154193120905302218
6. Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. 2014. The pen is mightier than the
keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychol. Sci. 25,
1159–1168. doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581
SUBMITTED: 30 October 2020; ACCEPTED: 08 March 2022;
PUBLISHED ONLINE: 06 April 2022.
EDITOR: Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
SCIENCE MENTOR: Maria Garraa
CITATION: Plebanek DJ and James KH (2022) Why Handwriting is Good for Your
Brain. Front. Young Minds 10:623953. doi: 10.3389/frym.2022.623953
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors declare that the research was conducted in
the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed
as a potential conflict of interest.
COPYRIGHT © 2022 Plebanek and James. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use,
distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication
in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use,
distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
YOUNG REVIEWER
ROSA, AGE: 11
I was born in 2010 in Italy and then moved to the UK when I was 8 months. I
am bilingual and very interested in in Language Learning. I have also a passion
for football. Actually I do play football everyday, it is an obsession! I like staying
active, listening to others and cooking, not baking! I have performed in a couple
of Science Festivals, promoting the benefits of bilingualism. I trully love science and
I in particular want to know more on how the brain works.
AUTHORS
DANIEL J. PLEBANEK
Daniel J. Plebanek Ph.D. was a 4th year Graduate student working with Professor
Karin James. He completed his Ph.D. in 2020. He studied how children learn
in many dierent situations, and his work has been widely published in many
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scientific journals. He died suddenly in the fall of 2020, soon after writing this paper.
†Deceased
KARIN H. JAMES
Professor Karin H. James Ph.D. has studied brain development in young children for
the past 20 years. She is interested in how moving and writing can help children
concentrate, and improve their memory. She has over 60 published studies on child
development and how the brain changes as we learn. Professor James trains many
students on how to perform scientific research. She works at Indiana University in
Bloomington, IN. *khjames@indiana.edu
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