Scientists have drawn a clear line between one everyday skill and clearer thinking.
Writing by hand – instead of typing on a laptop or tapping on your phone – has serious cognitive benefits.
“There’s actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand,” Ramesh Balasubramaniam, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced, told NPR in 2024.
For one, writing by hand is a slower process, giving us time to address thoughts more intentionally as they arise than bashing out text on a laptop keyboard, experts say.
The slower pace allows us to be more reflective and deliberate, researchers say, fostering creative and critical analysis.
But it’s the physical aspects that really help boost memory.
“It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying,” Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher and professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, told Scientific American. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.”
The act of writing characters strengthens connections between regions of the brain, a crucial part of absorbing new information and building memories, researchers found.
That didn’t happen with typing, Van der Meer and other researchers noted in a study of 36 university students. Handwritten notes help people to better visualize concepts, Tufts University research says.
“They use spatial reasoning through sketches and the way they layout information to encode ideas on a page. This commonly leads to higher performance of those who are taking notes by hand on conceptual questions, particularly when they are provided with the opportunity to review their notes,” researchers stated.
It also takes more effort to hold a pen or pencil and monitor pressure to trace out the correct letters than it does to tap a key.
“Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter,” Sophia Vinci-Booher, an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, also told NPR.
There’s something more meditative and rhythmic about handwriting, too. Calligraphy helps reduce stress and lowers the heart rate, Chinese researchers found in a small 2014 study.
It may be a digital world but there are several steps you can take to write more by hand. First, carry a notebook, pad or Post-it notes and a pen in your bag. Keeping things handy makes you more likely to commit to the practice.
Keep a book nearby – when at home and on the move. Reading more, both fiction and non-fiction, can make you more likely to write more by expanding your vocabulary and writing style.
Schedule a period of creative writing daily – just 20 minutes is enough to see benefits, the 2014 study found. You don’t have to be writing a book, either. Letters. poems and even to-do lists count.
