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.
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.
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.
I can't solve complicated problems on a keyboard, I need a pen and paper for deep thinking. It's very rare that I go back and read any of it, means to an end.
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.
> 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.
>>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.
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.
>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)
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.
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.
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.
it seems like these experiments are designed to generate a strong statistical effect? "data confirms old people forced to carry a 120lb weight run slower than unencumbered college track athletes!"
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.
They picked the 'digital generation' (early 20s), and then they forced them to type with right index finger only?
I'm a 45 year old touch typist, and I tried to type above sentence with my right index finger, and basically failed. The unfamiliar motion going against 30 years of muscle memory took all my brain power away from anything resembling creative thought or memorization.
My therapist sent me a study like this few years back when I wanted to write my journal on my laptop :). My comment is the same as back then - the study showing different regions light up is in the wrong order.
1. Do the functional test first - have a big group of people handwrite, and another big group of people type in the way that works for them, and then test memory and understanding.
2. Then, if there's an actual statistical difference, run the imaging tests to see if you can explain why.
As it is, these studies seem just "hey look at different pretty lights". Handwriting for many people in modern age is almost more of an artistic process than typing is; I'm sure it indeed lights up different areas of brain, as would caligraphy or painting - but please, please, start with functional testing first!
I am trying to bring this message to schools. We developed https://getsmartpaper.com for under-resourced schools in India, but are realizing that there is a major need for paper-digital integration within over-resourced US schools with 50%+ screen time.
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.
How broadly the brain is activated is obviously not a meaningful measure of how well someone learns a topic. It is clear that handwriting requires more complex motor motions and visual processing, but why does that matter at all? Equivalently someone could argue, that, because more of the brain is "activated", the less focused the student is on the material, as the brain needs to perform additional motor and visual tasks.
>The study’s findings suggest that handwriting should remain an essential part of education
No, it doesn't. The setup could not even do it in theory. We lack a total understanding of how "learning a subject" and "brain activity" are related. There is no devices you can put on a human that could measure, after a study session, how well the human has learned some subject.
I hate these types of studies. Having a subject do something and measure how their brain lights up tells us precisely nothing. These studies are done again and again and again, there are no actionable results and no new insights. Nothing new about the brain was learned.
(BTW I wrote thousands of pages of hand written notes during University. My point has nothing to do with how effective or ineffective handwriting is for learning.)
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
I wish there were a better study to back up my anecdotal observation that they are correct. I've argued with my kids about this, and they insist that they can just take notes on a computer, but when I _stopped_ taking notes on a computer and switched to paper, it made a huge deal in my comprehension and retention. Definitely agree this study doesn't offer much evidence either way, unfortunately.
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.
> Handwriting activates broader brain networks than typing
No shit. My handwriting is so cryptic, I myself can't even read it. And if I have to go through my older than a few months notes - forget about it. It requires so much brain power, imagination and creativity (mostly for coming up with cursing words) that it must be not only fully activating my brain networks, but the afferent neurons up my butt.
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".
This is literally the bell curve meme. Left side: just a pencil and a paper, right side: just a pencil and a paper, in the middle: obsidian, notion, latex, word whatever
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it was different when I was a kid, but nowadays writing anything more than a signature with a pencil or pen makes my fingers tired and crampy.
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.
I can't solve complicated problems on a keyboard, I need a pen and paper for deep thinking. It's very rare that I go back and read any of it, means to an end.
Anecdotaly I need to move boxes and arrows around to solve my complicated problems, so pen and paper doesn't cut it either.
I used to do it in sequencing programs like PlantUML, but moved to draw.io -> figjam afterwards, with mouse and keyboard and stylus.
What you're used to and what features you need will heavily influenced the process I guess.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
>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)
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.
And this is exactly why we need the metaverse! (kidding)
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.
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.
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.
This study has been covered in HN before.
Is it really "typing" if you are only allowed to use your index finger?
it seems like these experiments are designed to generate a strong statistical effect? "data confirms old people forced to carry a 120lb weight run slower than unencumbered college track athletes!"
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.
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
Qwerty has a strong left-hand bias even if you're right-handed.
Hang on.
They picked the 'digital generation' (early 20s), and then they forced them to type with right index finger only?
I'm a 45 year old touch typist, and I tried to type above sentence with my right index finger, and basically failed. The unfamiliar motion going against 30 years of muscle memory took all my brain power away from anything resembling creative thought or memorization.
My therapist sent me a study like this few years back when I wanted to write my journal on my laptop :). My comment is the same as back then - the study showing different regions light up is in the wrong order.
1. Do the functional test first - have a big group of people handwrite, and another big group of people type in the way that works for them, and then test memory and understanding.
2. Then, if there's an actual statistical difference, run the imaging tests to see if you can explain why.
As it is, these studies seem just "hey look at different pretty lights". Handwriting for many people in modern age is almost more of an artistic process than typing is; I'm sure it indeed lights up different areas of brain, as would caligraphy or painting - but please, please, start with functional testing first!
I am trying to bring this message to schools. We developed https://getsmartpaper.com for under-resourced schools in India, but are realizing that there is a major need for paper-digital integration within over-resourced US schools with 50%+ screen time.
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.
Not having backspace makes you think.
Proper use of backspace, cut, copy, paste during writing is actually writing and editing at the same time.
Having nice handwriting requires practice.
Having fast handwriting requires practice.
Let's learn it all, and while doing one of those, think of all the other modes. Maximum brain networks all the time.
Also, let's do that memory trick of coming up with a story to memorize long sequences of words.
It definitely activates my pain receptors after a few minutes.
Also
> For the typing condition, participants typed the same words on a keyboard using only their right index finger
This “study” is complete garbage.
This is pseudo science.
How broadly the brain is activated is obviously not a meaningful measure of how well someone learns a topic. It is clear that handwriting requires more complex motor motions and visual processing, but why does that matter at all? Equivalently someone could argue, that, because more of the brain is "activated", the less focused the student is on the material, as the brain needs to perform additional motor and visual tasks.
>The study’s findings suggest that handwriting should remain an essential part of education
No, it doesn't. The setup could not even do it in theory. We lack a total understanding of how "learning a subject" and "brain activity" are related. There is no devices you can put on a human that could measure, after a study session, how well the human has learned some subject.
I hate these types of studies. Having a subject do something and measure how their brain lights up tells us precisely nothing. These studies are done again and again and again, there are no actionable results and no new insights. Nothing new about the brain was learned.
(BTW I wrote thousands of pages of hand written notes during University. My point has nothing to do with how effective or ineffective handwriting is for learning.)
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
I wish there were a better study to back up my anecdotal observation that they are correct. I've argued with my kids about this, and they insist that they can just take notes on a computer, but when I _stopped_ taking notes on a computer and switched to paper, it made a huge deal in my comprehension and retention. Definitely agree this study doesn't offer much evidence either way, unfortunately.
Your link is bad.
Here you go: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Fixed it. Thanks
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.
> Handwriting activates broader brain networks than typing
No shit. My handwriting is so cryptic, I myself can't even read it. And if I have to go through my older than a few months notes - forget about it. It requires so much brain power, imagination and creativity (mostly for coming up with cursing words) that it must be not only fully activating my brain networks, but the afferent neurons up my butt.
If you drive with your off-hand while handwriting you're going to activate even more brain networks!
I'm sure carving letters into stone activates even broader brain networks -- and the rest of the body as well.
Haven't these EEG and FMRI studies proven to be mostly pseudoscience? More activity = more better sounds like an unwarranted assumption to me.
GenZ can't do cursive.
Genuinely impressed someone registered to post that comment
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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".
This is literally the bell curve meme. Left side: just a pencil and a paper, right side: just a pencil and a paper, in the middle: obsidian, notion, latex, word whatever