'Writing by hand may increase brain connectivity more than typing on a keyboard'

Guess what, a new study investigated brain activity during hand- and typewriting, and they found what everybody knows: welcome to da Science™, reinventing itself, c. 2025

I found this gem a few days ago, and since this is a pertinent issue for everyone who fights against public school systems for the benefit of one’s children, here goes.

And to set this up, the below anecdote will have to do:

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a parent meeting at my elder daughter’s school (she’s in 6th grade). While we were awaiting the start of the meeting, I was chatting with some other parents and remarked on my the following issue—my elder daughter uses the ‘eagle approach’ (two fingers circling the keyboard) when typing.

Norwegian schools hand out iPads with keyboards in 1st grade, so one would assume that children are taught how to use all ten fingers when typing. Or so I thought. My interlocutor listened and replied: ‘My daughter doesn’t know how to hold a pencil.’

That’s about all that needs to be said to introduce the below piece; if you require a long-form introduction to these absurdities, please consider my three-part series from almost two years ago:

Nordic Delusions: Education Levels Dovetail Due to 'Excessive Digitalisation' (Part 1)

Nordic Delusions: 'Excessive Digitalisation' to Bring Nat'l Cell Phone Bans and Less Screen Time (Part 2)

Nordic Delusions: Scandinavia Bids Farewell to 'Excessive Digitalisation', but at least Students are Showering more Often (Part 3)

The pieces quoted here are in English, hence I’ve merely added emphases and [snark].

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Writing by hand may increase brain connectivity more than typing on a keyboard

In an ever more digital world, pen and paper are increasingly getting replaced with screens and keyboards in classrooms. Now, a new study has investigated neural networks in the brain during hand- and typewriting. The researchers showed that connectivity between different brain regions is more elaborate when letters are formed by hand. This improved brain connectivity, which is crucial to memory building and information encoding, may indicate that writing by hand supports learning.

By Deborah Pirchner, Frontiers in [Science], 26 Jan. 2024 [source]

As digital devices progressively replace pen and paper, taking notes by hand is becoming increasingly uncommon in schools and universities. Using a keyboard is recommended because it’s often faster than writing by hand. However, the latter has been found to improve spelling accuracy and memory recall [that’s also my experience across 25 years in academia].

To find out if the process of forming letters by hand resulted in greater brain connectivity, researchers in Norway now investigated the underlying neural networks involved in both modes of writing.

‘We show that when writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns are far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard’, said Prof Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and co-author of the study published in Frontiers in Psychology. '

Such widespread brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, is beneficial for learning.

The Pen is Mightier Than the (key)oard

The researchers collected EEG data from 36 university students [a very small, selective sample] who were repeatedly prompted to either write or type a word that appeared on a screen. When writing, they used a digital pen [unsure if that helps or has an impact] to write in cursive directly on a touchscreen. When typing they used a single finger to press keys on a keyboard [a rather realistic aspect, but that’s hardly credible if you use more fingers]. High-density EEGs, which measure electrical activity in the brain using 256 small sensors sewn in a net and placed over the head, were recorded for five seconds for every prompt [so no-one is able to say anything about long-term recall etc.].

Connectivity of different brain regions increased when participants wrote by hand, but not when they typed. ‘Our findings suggest that visual and movement information obtained through precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning’, van der Meer said.

Movement for Memory

Although the participants used digital pens for handwriting, the researchers said that the results are expected to be the same when using a real pen on paper [that’s a falsifiable hypothesis, which was not tested and comes down to comparing apples to oranges (or a newer version of any poison/death juice to its predecessor, as opposed to a true placebo, such as saline)]. ‘We have shown that the differences in brain activity are related to the careful forming of the letters when writing by hand while making more use of the senses’, van der Meer explained. Since it is the movement of the fingers carried out when forming letters that promotes brain connectivity, writing in print is also expected to have similar benefits for learning as cursive writing [which has long been abandoned in Western countries].

On the contrary, the simple movement of hitting a key with the same finger repeatedly is less stimulating for the brain. ‘This also explains why children who have learned to write and read on a tablet, can have difficulty differentiating between letters that are mirror images of each other, such as ‘b’ and ‘d’ [that’s exactly what my 11yo (she insists that she’s ‘almost 12’, added for good measure here)]. They literally haven’t felt with their bodies what it feels like to produce those letters’, van der Meer said [which is code for ‘that kind of tech degrades one’s humanity’].

A Balancing Act

Their findings demonstrate the need to give students the opportunity to use pens, rather than having them type during class, the researchers said. Guidelines to ensure that students receive at least a minimum of handwriting instruction could be an adequate step. For example, cursive writing training has been re-implemented in many US states at the beginning of the year [hasn’t happened in Norway, and if you’d want me to, I’ll rant about their piss-poor education system, which regularly stuns my interlocutors].

At the same time, it is also important to keep up with continuously developing technological advances, they cautioned. This includes awareness of what way of writing offers more advantages under which circumstances. ‘There is some evidence that students learn more and remember better when taking handwritten lecture notes, while using a computer with a keyboard may be more practical when writing a long text or essay’, van der Meer concluded [oh my, what a stupid, empty comment; of course, they do; this is known since before WW1 (cue Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, etc), if only because, e.g., taking notes in a lecture hall requires you to perform a selection of the information you heard and consider rephrasing well before writing anything down].

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A Discussion of Van der Weel & Van der Weel (2025)

First up, here is the link to the original article, entitled ‘Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom’, Front. Psychol., 26 January 2024, Sec. Educational Psychology, Volume 14 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945 (or download the pdf).

Second, let’s look at the study set-up, which is instructive as to how such findings™ are reported™:

Participants were mostly students and were recruited at the university campus. They received a $15 cinema ticket for taking part. To avoid crossover effects between the two hemispheres, only right-handed participants were included [I kinda understand this to ensure a certain, if limited, level playing field, so to speak], as determined by the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldfield, 1971). Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard to interpret the results [this is more problematic as the authors admit that they are, in fact, assembling a cart of apples and label them oranges™]. Participants gave their informed written consent, and it was made clear that they could withdraw from the experiment at any time without consequences [no such thing was ever done for the poison/death juices, by the way; jus’ sayin’]. The Regional Committee for Medical and Health Ethics (Central Norway) approved the study.

And here is some prose of the findings:

Increased connectivity in theta/alpha range for handwriting

The present findings revealed increased connectivity for handwriting over typewriting, suggesting that different underlying cognitive processes are involved in the two tasks [no shit analysis here, really]…As increased connectivity in the brain was observed only when writing by hand and not when simply pressing keys on the keyboard, our findings can be taken as evidence that handwriting promotes learning. Interestingly, the increased connectivity between the various brain regions seems to be linked to the specific sensorimotor processes that are so typical in handwriting.

Handwriting requires fine motor control over the fingers, and it forces students to pay attention to what they are doing. Typing, on the other hand, requires mechanical and repetitive movements that trade awareness for speed. Our results reveal that whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity. It appears [sic] that the movements related to typewriting do not activate these connectivity networks the same way that handwriting does. The concurrent spatiotemporal pattern from vision, motor commands, and proprioceptive feedback provided through fine hand and finger movements, is lacking in typewriting…

Thus, the ongoing substitution of handwriting by typewriting in almost every educational setting may seem somewhat misguided as it could [ahem] affect the learning process in a negative way.

I suppose this is good enough. We’ve known about this for over a century, and there’s a world of difference between typing on an actual keyboard vs. a touch screen, I’d add (to confound the authors a bit).

Needless to say, a ‘commentary’ was submitted—and guess what kind of stance Svetlana Pinet and Marieke Longcamp take…?! (references omitted for readability; please refer to the linked original):

Their rationale is that since connectivity during handwriting is ‘far more elaborate’ (p. 1), handwriting facilitates learning and should be practiced from a young age at school. This logical shortcut deserves scrutiny, for two reasons.

First, the protocol did not include any learning. Participants repeatedly wrote well-known words without any requirement for memory encoding, preventing any conclusions in terms of learning [that’s a fair argument; also, university students are already a very selected study group and the study doesn’t say a lot about the general public, to say nothing about the small sample]. Moreover, VMVW2024 is a lab-based study with an adult population. Translation from well-controlled protocols to educational settings in a child population is not straightforward [also a fair point]. The very possibility of using research from fundamental cognitive neuroscience to inform educational practices is debated. In sum, drawing conclusions on learning processes in children in a classroom from a lab study carried out on a group of university students that did not include any type of learning seems slippery at best [and I less-than-fondly recall the poor 8 mice sacrificed by da Science™ for the poison/death juice booster, but, hey, that’s a different field, thing, and context, right? Right].

Second, the interpretation of increased theta/alpha connectivity as an unequivocal indicator of a brain state favorable to learning and remembering is problematic. While theta and alpha oscillations have been functionally related to a variety of cognitive processes, it has not been clearly established that increased theta/alpha connectivity creates appropriate conditions for learning [kinda a moot point since, as per the preceding paragraph, no learning was done]. Among the studies cited by the authors to support their claim, Solomon et al. (2017) indeed reported increased theta connectivity, but in situations of explicit encoding and retrieval (Andres et al., 1999 for a similar finding in alpha/beta frequency bands [more apples vs. oranges]). Raghavachari et al. (2001) showed increased theta oscillations in a working memory task. It remains a stretch to use this finding as proof that theta connectivity promotes learning [which was, I reiterate, not studied in the paper]; handwriting might simply require more sustained working memory maintenance because it is generally slower than typing.

Claims unsupported by the results

VWVM2024 makes strong claims such as ‘Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity’ (p. 1). However, only the difference between handwriting and typing is reported in the results, not connectivity patterns for each condition separately. While Figure 2 of VWVM2024 displays coherence plots for each condition, statistical analysis was performed exclusively on the difference between handwriting and typing, which precludes any conclusion from being drawn on either condition on its own and puts the validity of the title of the article into question [another fair criticism; I suppose these things could have also been said about, say, virtually all papers about vaccine efficacy (as an aside, did you notice that these somehow disappeared™ from journals around the second half of 2022 at the latest…?]

Artificial Typing Conditions

…Skilled typing is characterized by the coordination between hands and the use of several fingers…

Lack of Behavioral Measures

…behavioral measures are not reported. Establishing a solid behavioral pattern is usually a requirement before interpreting neurophysiological measures…

I’ll stop here, but I will add the following: the paper was picked up quickly and widely, yet apparently no-one in his or her right mind pointed to yet another serious flaw well beyond all of the above:

The sample consisted of 36 STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) students, with ‘the data from 12 adult participants were already used in analyses in the time-frequency domain (Askvik et al., 2020)’.

This means a third of the sample had participated in such a study before, which also calls into question the setup in regards to novelty.

Moreover, I suppose that STEM students may (hem) have different prerequisites for entering these curricula than, say, Gender Studies (not a real thing, but you get the point). I humbly suggest that these notions indicate the study population to be a teeny-tiny subset of the general public.

Weird shit, but also nothing new in terms of knowledge.

Bottom Lines

That top-linked, three-part series had an unplanned fourth instalment, which details the many (absurd) ways higher education™ deals with the output of the school systems. It’s too painful a read to quote, but I highly recommend it as it features a bunch of university lecturers pontificating about how much time they spend creating short Youtube clips for students who can’t (or won’t) bother to read.

I’ll give you a snippet here:

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At the Faculty of Law at UiO, students receive parts of the syllabus in a format that they are well used to—namely as short videos on YouTube [this is about the most stupid part here].

Teaching on YouTube

‘I made these videos because I missed exactly this type of video when I was a student myself’, says lecturer Knut Sande:

I found it both tiring, boring and heavy at times, especially reading the textbook [well, you’re perhaps not doing what you’re good at, dude].

He doesn’t think making shot video clips about complex topics makes it too easy for students:

On the contrary, I give the students an opportunity to immerse themselves in difficult issues [huhum, well, they could, you know, *read*].

Caption: ‘Ph.D. candidate Knut Sande has made wasted his time making video clips for fellow law students.’ Lord, help us.

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Here’s the rest, if you care to learn *more*:

Nordic Delusions: Banquet of Consequences Edition

So, what to make of these idiotic things?

Sure, one has to ‘go with the times’, but the ‘excessive digitisation’ of almost all aspects of life has thoroughly wrecked mankind. Yeah, call this ‘first-world problems’ and issues that mostly pertain to white-collar weirdos in academia (such as your humble author here).

But the moment you have kids, the tables turn, for the borderline insane students of the above piece are your children’s teachers tomorrow.

I don’t have anything good to say about my dear and esteemed colleagues who participate in these shenanigans.

These digital gimmicks are de-humanising everything, and as such, they are the enemy.

If you’re still reading this, join me:

The World We Left Behind

And bring your donkey-riding sidekick, for we’re going to charge a bunch of windmills.