“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene,
a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core
recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by
mental simulation in your brain.
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“And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.”
A 2012 study led by Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University,
lent support to that view. Children who had not yet learned to read and
write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and
asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page
with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a
computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image
again.
The
researchers found that the initial duplication process mattered a great
deal. When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited
increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in
adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior
frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex.
By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was significantly weaker.
Dr.
James attributes the differences to the messiness inherent in free-form
handwriting: Not only must we first plan and execute the action in a
way that is not required when we have a traceable outline, but we are
also likely to produce a result that is highly variable.
Photo
Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, used a scanner to see how handwriting affected activity in children’s brains.Credit
A. J. Mast for The New York Times
That
variability may itself be a learning tool. “When a kid produces a messy
letter,” Dr. James said, “that might help him learn it.”
Our
brain must understand that each possible iteration of, say, an “a” is
the same, no matter how we see it written. Being able to decipher the
messiness of each “a” may be more helpful in establishing that eventual
representation than seeing the same result repeatedly.
“This is one of the first demonstrations of the brain being changed because of that practice,” Dr. James said.
In
another study, Dr. James is comparing children who physically form
letters with those who only watch others doing it. Her observations
suggest that it is only the actual effort that engages the brain’s motor
pathways and delivers the learning benefits of handwriting.
The effect goes well beyond letter recognition. In a study that followed children in grades two through five, Virginia Berninger,
a psychologist at the University of Washington, demonstrated that
printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated
with distinct and separate brain patterns — and each results in a
distinct end product. When the children composed text by hand, they not
only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a
keyboard, but expressed more ideas. And brain imaging
in the oldest subjects suggested that the connection between writing
and idea generation went even further. When these children were asked to
come up with ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting
exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working
memory — and increased overall activation in the reading and writing
networks.
Photo
Samples of handwriting by
young children. Dr. James found that when children drew a letter
freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three significant areas
of the brain, which didn’t happen when they traced or typed the letter.Credit
Karin James
It
now appears that there may even be a difference between printing and
cursive writing — a distinction of particular importance as the teaching
of cursive disappears in curriculum after curriculum. In dysgraphia, a
condition where the ability to write is impaired, usually after brain
injury, the deficit can take on a curious form: In some people, cursive
writing remains relatively unimpaired, while in others, printing does.
In
alexia, or impaired reading ability, some individuals who are unable to
process print can still read cursive, and vice versa — suggesting that
the two writing modes activate separate brain networks and engage more
cognitive resources than would be the case with a single approach.
Dr.
Berninger goes so far as to suggest that cursive writing may train
self-control ability in a way that other modes of writing do not, and
some researchers argue that it may even be a path to treating dyslexia. A
2012 review
suggests that cursive may be particularly effective for individuals
with developmental dysgraphia — motor-control difficulties in forming
letters — and that it may aid in preventing the reversal and inversion
of letters.
Cursive
or not, the benefits of writing by hand extend beyond childhood. For
adults, typing may be a fast and efficient alternative to longhand, but
that very efficiency may diminish our ability to process new
information. Not only do we learn letters better when we commit them to
memory through writing, memory and learning ability in general may
benefit.
Two psychologists, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, have reported
that in both laboratory settings and real-world classrooms, students
learn better when they take notes by hand than when they type on a
keyboard. Contrary to earlier studies attributing the difference to the
distracting effects of computers, the new research suggests that writing
by hand allows the student to process a lecture’s contents and reframe
it — a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better
understanding and memory encoding.
Not
every expert is persuaded that the long-term benefits of handwriting
are as significant as all that. Still, one such skeptic, the Yale
psychologist Paul Bloom, says the new research is, at the very least, thought-provoking.
“With
handwriting, the very act of putting it down forces you to focus on
what’s important,” he said. He added, after pausing to consider, “Maybe
it helps you think better.”
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