"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" so all participants had to "type using the right index finger [only]".
How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general? The paper only contains that one line about the matter, in the "Participants" section. (also, do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?)
I think it gets worse
> To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the participant was typewriting.
So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing.
Too many variables are changed between the two tests.
A) writers can see whole words vs no visual feedback
B) writers use their natural writing technique (2 or 3 fingers?) vs 1.
It'd be interesting to test typing with a single hand (using words that can be entirely touch typed with one hand)
> So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing.
This is how I feel as a left hander while writing the old fashioned way. I can’t see what I’m writing so I get sloppy really quickly, and always need paper with lines.
Not that this makes their methodology not totally bunk, of course.
Do you have any advice for helping a child who is left handed and sucks at penmanship?
My youngest is left handed, and his writing is just trash. I have no idea how to help him outside of specific left handed writing tools (that I'm pretty sure don't help at all).
I'm left handed and had terrible penmanship as a child and all through undergrad. A few things have really helped me.
1. Get pens that write with low friction. As a lefty you're 'pushing' the pen instead of pulling it, and tools with higher friction cause the pen to tilt up in your hand. I found writing with gel pens, a nice fountain pen, or now I use 0.2/0.25 inking pens as my main 'daily driver'.
2. Focus on a few 'problem letters' and get them well sorted. I always struggled with things like 'u' and 'v', '5' and 's', etc. In college I had to make these work, so I spent a lot of time developing a specific style for all of the problem symbols and got *really* good at them.
3. Print vs cursive. I know in school they make you learn cursive, but a lot of the connections between letters decrease readability, and increase complexity for writing them. I no long write in pure cursive, but I have a sort of hybrid print/cursive script. I write many letters in their cursive form as they are faster and flow better, but I never connect letters together. It is a good compromise between speed and readability.
4. Practice, practice, practice. I know this is probably self evident, but it really does take practice. Practice writing letters slowly. It's like martial arts, you go slow and get the movement perfect. Then do it over and over again. That builds the muscle memory better.
I don’t know if it helps, but Tūl brand pens in the US are gel pens like you mention. I’ve never had a favorite pen, but I do since a friend introduced these to me.
Lefty, but also someone who has a brain that prefers the right for sport (bat/ball games), as disclaimer... Handwriting is clear and can print or use cursive.
When I used to write more on paper, many moons ago, I'd turn the paper 90 degrees to the right. Many lefties curl their hands over. I never got that, I just turn the paper. The body has to compensate a little but much more natural for the wrist when writing for longer spells.
Come to think of it, I don't do it much at all now, have probably got workarounds I'm unaware of at this point. My notebook stays aligned with the desk. Perhaps a slight tilt.
Either way, experiment with moving the paper, not the wrist, and get smooth pens as mentioned elsewhere. Fountain pens from Parker used to be my go to. Gel or roller are fine though.
Good luck!
Edit: I also learned to write under the line, so didn't drag my hand through the ink. Probably due to fountain pen use forcing that. Back when blotting paper was a thing!
My SO is left handed, and here’s her trick: slant the paper.
If you write with the same positioning we teach to right handers, the hand hides the writing, and if you use a fountain pen you just smear the writing before it has a chance to dry. So don’t: slant the paper, like 45 degrees counter clockwise, and position your hand above the line you’re writing. Somewhat. I’m not the leftie, I’m working from memory here.
The key idea is to keep the text visible, and keep the writing position relatively comfortable. Then it’s just down to training. Target a specific style, draw individual letters… write stuff while concentrating on the writing, not whatever you need the writing for (you can’t really practice and take notes for instance).
Mostly boring advice, that apart from slanting the paper probably applies to everyone. (Note: I also have terrible hand writing, grain of salt and all that.)
I’m left handed, and my handwriting writing goes from really nice to shit when I use different pens. My advice is experiment with different types. I love BiC pens, they feel super smooth.
Also, growing up in Israel, where we write right to left, I don’t recall any of my right-handed friends having issues with handwriting.
They didn't say in what way the kid's handwriting is trash, but I've noticed that westerners who have spent time writing kanji end up with handwriting that looks like it was done by a machine.
Probably the same concept at play, but what helped me as a kid was getting one of those black Pentel 0.5mm engineering mechanical pencils (used to be $5 apiece or so at Staples) and using it to write everything as small as possible. On college-rule paper my lettering would occupy 25% of the vertical space while strictly adhering to the bottom line in neat rows.
Few teachers could read my writing without a magnifying glass, but they got their revenge by specifying essay lengths in number of pages. I had to do 75% more work to meet the page count.
I wasn't intentionally being an asshole with this-- in writing such tiny lettering it forced me to pay attention to clarity of my lettering to an autistic degree, otherwise my writing would be entirely illegible to the teacher and my work would be rejected.
Also of interest are Arabic, Hebrew and other RTL scripts. Not sure if more myth than fact, but their origin was apparently in stone masonry and right handed hammer use. I can't quite believe it though, given the difference of ease in sourcing materials and the curves present in the scripts.
I studied Chinese, and modern mainland Chinese is written left to right and a pain for lefties to pass Chinese exams with. But the IMEs are great so you never have to write them out yourself, so you just need to focus on how the word sounds and what it looks like.
Not sure if it can be found online, but there is a hand position trick that allows left-handed people to "drag" the pencil instead of pushing which makes it much closer to right-handed motions.
I am left-handed and my handwriting is terrible, but my partner is also left-handed and her handwriting is very nice but she position her hands as described above to "pull", so clearly it can be done if you apply yourself.
She also hand writes a lot more while I am almost exclusively typing these days so practice definitely helps.
Most people write like trash if they started school after the school computer revolution. It's just about practise. I'm right handed and my handwriting is also realy bad. I started with computers much earlier than others in my class. The people in my class were pretty good, including the lefties. The English teacher was really bad but we got the explanation to that one: When he was young he was forced to switch from left to right hand. This was before the whip was outlawed as a teaching instrument...
Most people write like trash, but I am also left handed and haven't noticed a correlation between handedness and handwriting. For what it's worth, I have very good penmanship.
Learn to type? I never got over my penman ship problem, I just learnt to type and printed all my exams in college. And then it didn’t matter much after school since I would mostly type anyways.
If I had to do it over again, I would probably force myself to write right handed. It should be possible to get used to it, but that would really be a choice they have to make for themselves.
My english teacher was forced to switch from left to right when he was young and his writing was the worst in school. This was before the computer revolution so he did write all the time.
What? I don't think learning a new language like Arabic is the solution to their problem. Something like the Sarasa Dry so that they don't leave smudges on their hand might be more reasonable.
Not disagreeing with your points here in this context, but it's interesting to note that I learned touch typing on a typewriter in school and I know which letters I've missed when typing, and can happily copy pages of text without needing to see the screen - even to correct any errors.
I wonder if that's lost with this paper's method of typing.
I learned on a Mac. The course material was copying from a book without looking at the screen, then correcting the errors. This second pass to correct mistakes is different, and it's not clear that you can be removed when taking notes without affecting learning.
I generally don't look at a screen when I'm typing, I know how to touch type perfectly, I learned to type using mavis beacon in the 90s and you'd get a very low grade in computers if you couldn't touch type.
If you don’t look at either the screen or keyboard, how do you adjust for variations between keyboards?
I regularly switch between a laptop keyboard, standard external keyboard, and ergonomic (curved/split) external keyboard, including switching between ANSI/ISO keyboard layouts (my country defaults to ISO but my MacBook has ANSI). After each switch I generally need a bit of time to adjust, and type quite a bit of errors for the first half-hour or so.
Especially when I have to type special symbols like backslash and percent, which move quite a bit between keyboards.
Oh for sure, if I'm using a keyboard I don't know, then yeah, disregard everything, I probably look at the screen and the keyboard and make a lot of mistakes. I find the mac keyboards all feel pretty much exactly the same, I use a keychron at work, but yeah, to your point, if I walked into a random best buy, I'd probably be awful on the keyboard unless it was a mac or a keychron.
Out of curiosity, why so many keyboards? I work with a dude (lawyer) who takes his keyboard everywhere with him, ha.
Wow. Junk science indeed. "Unforeseen effects on the brain" so you essentially test in a way that is incomparable to those who are experienced typists?
If you're only using one finger to type, of course you're using less brain activity to control that one finger, versus all ten.
I'm unable to read the actual paper, but from the comments here, it sure seems like they worked backwards from an existing premise ("handwriting is better than typing for retaining information") and found a way to make that "truth".
Edit: Missed the link to the article in the comments. Reading it now.
They give a recommendation for education, but didn't measure retention.
I agree with their premise provided students don't know how to touch type (given the anecdotal amount of visual typing I've seen a reason concern for students) it's also interesting that it's cursive, which is being taught less.
I've heard that in some «almost only words» fields, laptops for students (and projectors for professors) got generalized during lectures (?),
while in math-heavy fields (and I assume, anything involving frequently having to do drawings / schematics), paper for students (and blackboards for professors) were still overwhelmingly used only a few years ago, and I predict are still going to be, until both hardware (e-paper just only barely got colour now !) and software gets much, MUCH better.
I think things like iPads aren't uncommon, at least that's what I was using - but handwriting on an iPad is virtually identical to pen and paper, so no real difference.
> How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general?
Exactly… Most people can after training type much faster than they can write with a pen, assuming they’re allowed to use all fingers, which I’d expect to be crucial when comparing them.
> do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?
Norwegian here: No. We learned cursive in elementary school but most students switched to “block letters” in secondary school. For the past 15+ years, students have also had school computers since secondary school, so about half of their writing went digital since then. (With somewhat negative results, given the attention span of most teens…)
> 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. Participants gave their informed written consent
but is it truly informed consent if it is written with multiple fingers?
I love this with Science. If something would be hard to work with, we just change it until it is easier to measure. That it has no resemblanse with what we were trying to measure is uninteresting.
> when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general
Yeah, the paper claims "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," which is bunk given the methodology.
But this is not handwriting vs typing. It's handwriting vs. "a weird input method none of the participants had ever used before", namely pecking at the keyboard with one finger of one hand.
I've been taking notes in a text editor since 1994. What I found was that taking notes via computer was much easier because I could finally keep up with what I'm taking notes about (typing is MUCH faster than writing), and could therefore spend more time considering the thing I'm taking notes on, rearrange things, group them, etc using simple keyboard commands.
My impression is that my retention went way up and I had better understanding overall because I could discover the underlying patterns quicker when I was spending less time and energy encoding my thoughts into words.
During college lectures my retention was highest when I didn’t notes at all. I found that if I took notes, most of my brain power went towards capturing the content instead of actively engaging with it.
Once I stopped taking notes, it freed up my mind to think critically about the material and helped me quickly identify when I was confused about something. When I was confused, I was able to ask the professor about it immediately instead of trying to figure it out on my own after the lecture
A middle ground is just to jot down a few words when something is unclear, just enough to let you know what you need to go back and review.
Not all professors want to take questions during lecture, it works fine in small classes but it can be quite disruptive in a large lecture class when you have a sylabus to stick to in a fixed number of lecture meetings.
People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.
That has never been the case for me -- while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer, and then am struggling to catch up, and when I finally figure out what they're explaining again, there's no more time to write it down.
But I can type faster than lecturers speak. And obviously you don't take notes verbatim either, just the gist of a sentence. Then after the seminar is over, I can go over the notes at my own pace to build my understanding. Details that didn't seem that relevant during the seminar, I suddenly realize are key.
I really don't understand why people don't talk about this advantage more.
> People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.
> while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer
That's not the same kind of note-taking. The first is writing for understanding, the second is taking quick notes to avoid missing anything while the lecturer is talking.
No, I'm saying when I missed the last three sentences, now I don't even understand the lecture anymore. There's a variable written on the board and I don't know what it represents.
And then by the time I figure it out, I haven't understood a bunch of previous points that depended on knowing what the variable was.
When I did my teacher training fifteen or so years ago, we were told that information that was written down by hand was retained for longer than information that was typed. This article seems to correlate with what I was taught.
However, there's no underlying theory to anything in psychology. Psychologists come up with things they call theories, but when you look at them a bit more closely, they're 'just-so stories' that happen to fit some experimental results. The experimental results themselves are shallow correlations between inputs and outputs. Prod the brain in this specific way, and see how it responds. EEG experiments like the one linked only tell us what bits of the brain respond to what stimuli; we don't know what's actually going on in forming a response to that stimulus.
You can point to the ethics protocols by which experimenters are bound to not harm their subjects - these are important and worthy. You can point to the advertising industry's use of psychology to improve its effectiveness, but this is itself a shallow endeavour. As far as improving our understanding the brain as a physical system, the discipline of psychology is much activity with little achievement.
So the study's findings only hold where typewriting means typing "the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard," i.e. like a pigeon.
It looks like this was done because while handwriting is a unihemispheral activity, typing with both hands is not. But it trashes the results from a practical perspective.
> The experiment comprised a total of 30 trials, where each word appeared in two different conditions, presented in a randomized order. For each trial, participants were instructed to either (a) write in cursive with their right hand the presented word with a digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard. Before each trial, the instruction write or type appeared before one of the target words appeared, and the participants were given 25 s to either write by hand or type the word multiple times, separated by a space. EEG data were recorded only during the first 5 s of each trial. To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the participant was typewriting. The writings produced by the participants (see Figure 1 for example) were stored for offline analyses.
I wonder what the effect would be when considering:
Yes I would think that it would be difficult to distinguish between brain activity caused by learning a subject and brain activity caused by learning to write cursive.
Interesting! Explains that even though I've used a laptop since 1992 to do school work because of my learning disabilities(Dysgraphia, mid-line problems, poor fine motor control) I still prefer to hand write my notes. Even if I never read them I noticed that just the act of doing them helps me remember things. I might not remember the source but I can remember the act of note taking. I've noticed the same thing with reading as well.
This is why I think AI chatbots have so much potential for education. Every student can have extended dialogue about the topic and really exercise those neurons.
I think the widespread use of that for education would have precisely the opposite outcome that you'd want.
Nothing sinks in to anyones brain because they're not actually talking about it and they don't need to actually learn it for any reason in school because they can just ask the chatbot again at any moment.
I wonder if having offloaded arithmetic to calculators has led to a society that can't do math in their head well enough to make good choices at the supermarket or in other daily situations where simple math would be useful but the situation is too casual to pull out your calculator.
But the impact of that is tiny compared to the prospect of future generations offloading their general ideation and critical thinking to machines instead of just number crunching.
People internalize conversations and the thought processes that went into them. If I have a conversation with somebody, I often walk away remembering and understanding what somebody else said and why they said it. And these memories get used in future interactions. So just like the offloading of arithmetic likely resulted in people not being able to perform mental math, what would be the result of conversing with an AI that has hallucination/logical issues (a lesser intelligence)? Isn't it reasonable to guess that this will result in diminished reasoning?
I hadn't considered that. If that's the case then we should hope people simply copy and paste the output rather than try to engage with it or take it seriously.
Though in more practical economic terms, perhaps what we're being trained for is a future in which the typical worker has a low paying job sanity checking AI output rather than a higher paying job doing the work themself.
i remember when maths teachers would scold me for not knowing my multiplication tables “are you going to carry a calculator around with you every day?” they would say when seeing me use one. Turns out i do.
That is such a tired, boring, selective memory meme. Did you not use a calculator later on in your education, say high school, for stuff like graphing and helping with equations? Do you not think educators in primary school teaching basic arithmetic knew about that?
All our maths education is based on lies which are progressively disclosed. You’re told we can’t go below zero, that numbers are integers, that you can’t take the square root of a negative number… And slowly are introduced to all those concepts building on what you learned before.
And yet this meme of “hur dur, mah teachers saids I’d haves no calculators on me but I use a phone all the time, epic fail” prevails instead of pondering for two seconds that maybe your teacher was giving a cookie-cutter argument that a literal child could comprehend but be unable to refute so they could continue with the damn lesson.
And as if people use calculators that often. They don’t. Yet being able to do some basic arithmetic is useful in such simple areas as shopping, to make more informed decisions in a world that is constantly trying to trick you.
Technological progress requires that we adapt education at the same time. We can still teach the ability to reason through problems when necessary, but still utilize technology when useful
I think AI chatbots could help but only if that is an additional modality to learn and doesn’t trump all the classical ones becoming the main mode. That would be disastrous to learning IMO, nothing will stick because users will internalize they could ask the bot to reason it for them, something like “why remember all that trivia when you could just google it”.
Could a factor be that most people primarily typewrite now so it’s second nature muscle memory but the handwriting task requires just a little extra effort? I didn't see preexisting disposition factored in at all, so I’m curious.
I think it's actually the opposite - most people can't touch type, so they spend more time and concentration trying to type, which means less focus on the actual content. I would think that handwriting is more muscle memory for most people, thus they can focus more on what they're writing, making connections to it, etc.
The typewriting participants were explicitly not touch typing - they were instructed to... type with a single index finger...
> participants were instructed to either (a) write in cursive with their right hand the presented word with a digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard.
> The typewriting participants were explicitly not touch typing - they were instructed to... type with a single index finger...
Looks like this did this because "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," since handwriting is done with one hemisphere.
That might not be enough without any assessment of the subject's typing skill. Touch typists have effectively memorized the keyboard layout and would need less effort to find the key to type, even if limited to one finger at a time
still people who are touch typists are able to find the characters faster on the keyboard than others. this message is written that way to test that out, in parts where it was possible.
however, in my case the blank keycaps did make the task a bit more difficult. i would write faster in cursive, and it might feel less effort.
also the reason was outlined:
> 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.
While, statistically, that may be strictly true across the population, I suspect, in the main, people who are in an educational environment where note taking is a requirement can touch type.
I don't recall meeting anyone in the modern office—irrespective of department or title—in the last 25 years who can't touch type.
I think the difference in pressure holding the pen or pencil and the dexterity required to form letters still activates way more of the brain than simple touch type would.
I do feel there's a leap in the ability to remain in flow while typing once you're past a certain (high) level of proficiency. Looking at what you're typing really interrupts flow for me, at least when writing prose.
If I have a lot of writing to do, I almost always write longer passages with my eyes either closed or gazing at something other than the screen. When my thought is complete I open my eyes and do a few edits on whatever typos made it through.
I also do almost all of my writing in vim, so I never have to context switch between mouse and keyboard.
I tried for a few minutes to find the HN thread where somebody refuted the "handwriting is better than typing" for fact recall claim.
OTOH, IIRC,
- EEG measures brain activation. It takes more of the brain to hand write than to type, and so it is unsurprising that there is more activation during a writing by hand activity than during a typing activity.
- Do brain connectivity or neural activation correspond to favorable outcomes?
- Synaptic pruning eliminates connectivity in the brain; and that is presumably advantageous.
- Hyperconnectivity may be regarded as a disadvantage in discussions of neurodiversity. Witness recall from a network with intentional hyperconnectivity; too distracted by spurious activations?
- That's a test of dumb recall, which is a test of trivia retention.
- Is rote memorization the pinnacle of learning? To foster creative thinking and critical thinking, is trivia recall optimization ideal?
- (Isn't it necessary to forget so much of what we've been taught in order to succeed.)
- Is spaced repetition as or more effective than hand writing at increasing recall compared to passively listening?
- With persons who have injury and/or disability that prevents them from handwriting, do they have adaptations that enable them to succeed despite "having to" type instead?
- We don't hand write software; though some schools teach coding with pen and paper (and that somewhat reduces cheating, which confounds variance in success and retention).
- We write tests for software; we can't efficiently automatedly test software for quality and correctness unless the code is typed.
- Does anything ever grade, confirm, reject, or validate handwritten notes?
- Are there studies of this that measure recall after typing, and then after handwriting, too?
Edit: A, measure, B, measure; AND: B, measure, A, measure
Or not everyone is the same (even ignoring the.. interesting stud design of the paper that excluded touch typists).
When I would learn vocabulary in school for a secondary language, the teacher would always state how this is best done by writing everything by hand. I never ever saw observed that benefit and always felt that to be true for me.
So I might be delusional, or there is something else at play here.
Sometimes you just want to record the information quickly in a searchable way and forget about it until the next time you need it.
Not being able to recall something you do not want to might be a feature, and so is increasing the machine ability to recall it (as opposed to yours). Grepping text is always going to be more efficient than scanned handwritten paper notes.
Genes that promote improved written communications could have been selected for even if you use cuneiform as the starting timeframe you are considering. Of course that isn't the real starting time. Cave paintings are 40k years old. How long ago did we begin drawing in the dirt with sticks?
Just a note about “ so all participants had to "type using the right index finger [only]"…I should have put this in the title however lots of people over the age of 50 type like this i.e. my parents
I was forced to handwrite my whole school life and was forced to switch off of cursive when teachers decided they didnt want to read it so writing was very slow and painful for me. Typing blew open my ability to think because I could just bash out what I needed written down immediately and then edit as I saw fit instead of just missing my window to write something down and like not retaining it at all.
I made a point in college of taking handwritten notes (focusing on what I didn't know) and handwritten test cheat-sheets (even if they weren't allowed, simply as an exercise in summarizing). It helped in memorization and understanding tremendously.
Studies like this are why I lost my respect for the field, and left it a long time ago. I have not since regained my respect for psychology as a general field. Things like this are published all too frequently.
It is demonstrated that playing piano has positive effects on neural development, a task largely analogous to typing. Learning / honing any novel skill will have that effect. If you are pushing your the limits of your knowledge or skill-set and are improving, then your brain has to be adapting to things.
If one group is simply typing characters, one at a time, using one finger, of course nothing is going on in the brain. What aspect of the brain at that point is begin challenged? If anything I'd expect this task to result in a reduction of connectivity.
When handwritng you use some additional brain pathways to finely coordinate the hand. When typing you don’t need that but use a different one that learned the keyboard. I think using both is good to reinforce that knowledge.
Crappy science aside, I second the findings, sort of.
I always carry a notebook/pen with me, writing/drawing helps my brain process information in a way that doesn't happen with a keyboard. Whiteboards are even better, if slightly less portable.
Yeah, sounds honestly very obvious. Writing by hand is much more complicated than writing with a typewriter. However, nothing about the brain activity suggests that the increased learning effect has anything to do with the content of what is written. I propose that the increased brain activity is exclusively because one learns _to write_, but not what is written.
The link sends me to an empty page that wants me sign to sign up to upload PDF files to an AI tool. It's not clear what this tool is for, or what relation, if any, it has to the headline.
In the age of AGI why is handwriting recognition still so bad and not a mainstream technology?
Why do I still have to painstakingly write math formulas in LaTeX instead of just writing them by hand?
Why don't we write computer code by hand instead of typing it in and struggling with encodings?
We have face/object recognition and audio recognition which is often better than humans. But handwriting recognition is still quite lacking. Are there technical reasons for that or is our monopolistic IT industry just focusing on the things nobody needs like Metaverses, Augmented Reality and Chatbots?
I think the base premise of this comment is wrong? Apple has had many features like this available for a long time and it's hard to think of many things that are more mainstream technology. You can input text, equations and what have you with the Apple Pencil, you can scan your handwritten notes to text in Notes, etc, it's all already there.
Oh my god writing code by hand would be awful. I can type so much faster than I can write, and my hand doesn't start to hurt after a few words like it does when I write. Plus, how would code completion work with handwriting?
"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" so all participants had to "type using the right index finger [only]".
How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general? The paper only contains that one line about the matter, in the "Participants" section. (also, do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?)
I think it gets worse > To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the participant was typewriting.
So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing.
Too many variables are changed between the two tests.
A) writers can see whole words vs no visual feedback B) writers use their natural writing technique (2 or 3 fingers?) vs 1.
It'd be interesting to test typing with a single hand (using words that can be entirely touch typed with one hand)
I'm surprised the choose not to gather that data.
https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2306&...
Is interesting in that it shows the opposite effect: improved recall. It also measured velocity/speed of response. Which shows writing was faster.
Another idea for a test: writing without ink.
> So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing.
This is how I feel as a left hander while writing the old fashioned way. I can’t see what I’m writing so I get sloppy really quickly, and always need paper with lines.
Not that this makes their methodology not totally bunk, of course.
Do you have any advice for helping a child who is left handed and sucks at penmanship?
My youngest is left handed, and his writing is just trash. I have no idea how to help him outside of specific left handed writing tools (that I'm pretty sure don't help at all).
I'm left handed and had terrible penmanship as a child and all through undergrad. A few things have really helped me. 1. Get pens that write with low friction. As a lefty you're 'pushing' the pen instead of pulling it, and tools with higher friction cause the pen to tilt up in your hand. I found writing with gel pens, a nice fountain pen, or now I use 0.2/0.25 inking pens as my main 'daily driver'. 2. Focus on a few 'problem letters' and get them well sorted. I always struggled with things like 'u' and 'v', '5' and 's', etc. In college I had to make these work, so I spent a lot of time developing a specific style for all of the problem symbols and got *really* good at them. 3. Print vs cursive. I know in school they make you learn cursive, but a lot of the connections between letters decrease readability, and increase complexity for writing them. I no long write in pure cursive, but I have a sort of hybrid print/cursive script. I write many letters in their cursive form as they are faster and flow better, but I never connect letters together. It is a good compromise between speed and readability. 4. Practice, practice, practice. I know this is probably self evident, but it really does take practice. Practice writing letters slowly. It's like martial arts, you go slow and get the movement perfect. Then do it over and over again. That builds the muscle memory better.
I don’t know if it helps, but Tūl brand pens in the US are gel pens like you mention. I’ve never had a favorite pen, but I do since a friend introduced these to me.
Lefty, but also someone who has a brain that prefers the right for sport (bat/ball games), as disclaimer... Handwriting is clear and can print or use cursive.
When I used to write more on paper, many moons ago, I'd turn the paper 90 degrees to the right. Many lefties curl their hands over. I never got that, I just turn the paper. The body has to compensate a little but much more natural for the wrist when writing for longer spells.
Come to think of it, I don't do it much at all now, have probably got workarounds I'm unaware of at this point. My notebook stays aligned with the desk. Perhaps a slight tilt.
Either way, experiment with moving the paper, not the wrist, and get smooth pens as mentioned elsewhere. Fountain pens from Parker used to be my go to. Gel or roller are fine though.
Good luck!
Edit: I also learned to write under the line, so didn't drag my hand through the ink. Probably due to fountain pen use forcing that. Back when blotting paper was a thing!
My SO is left handed, and here’s her trick: slant the paper.
If you write with the same positioning we teach to right handers, the hand hides the writing, and if you use a fountain pen you just smear the writing before it has a chance to dry. So don’t: slant the paper, like 45 degrees counter clockwise, and position your hand above the line you’re writing. Somewhat. I’m not the leftie, I’m working from memory here.
The key idea is to keep the text visible, and keep the writing position relatively comfortable. Then it’s just down to training. Target a specific style, draw individual letters… write stuff while concentrating on the writing, not whatever you need the writing for (you can’t really practice and take notes for instance).
Mostly boring advice, that apart from slanting the paper probably applies to everyone. (Note: I also have terrible hand writing, grain of salt and all that.)
I’m left handed, and my handwriting writing goes from really nice to shit when I use different pens. My advice is experiment with different types. I love BiC pens, they feel super smooth.
Also, growing up in Israel, where we write right to left, I don’t recall any of my right-handed friends having issues with handwriting.
Hebrew is strange because maybe it was first written in stone rather than ink, so smearing wasn’t an issue? This page at least puts that forward as a possible reason: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/why-is-hebrew-writt...
I think clay, no?
That makes more sense, but the article speculates otherwise. Cuneiform which was definitely first written on clay tablets is left to right.
Learn to write upside down, then turn the paper upside down and write from right to left.
I've seen left handed people tilt the paper 90° and write more or less downwards. Their writing looked fine.
Learn Chinese.
It's traditionally written right-to-left, top-to-bottom.
They didn't say in what way the kid's handwriting is trash, but I've noticed that westerners who have spent time writing kanji end up with handwriting that looks like it was done by a machine.
Probably the same concept at play, but what helped me as a kid was getting one of those black Pentel 0.5mm engineering mechanical pencils (used to be $5 apiece or so at Staples) and using it to write everything as small as possible. On college-rule paper my lettering would occupy 25% of the vertical space while strictly adhering to the bottom line in neat rows.
Few teachers could read my writing without a magnifying glass, but they got their revenge by specifying essay lengths in number of pages. I had to do 75% more work to meet the page count.
I wasn't intentionally being an asshole with this-- in writing such tiny lettering it forced me to pay attention to clarity of my lettering to an autistic degree, otherwise my writing would be entirely illegible to the teacher and my work would be rejected.
Also of interest are Arabic, Hebrew and other RTL scripts. Not sure if more myth than fact, but their origin was apparently in stone masonry and right handed hammer use. I can't quite believe it though, given the difference of ease in sourcing materials and the curves present in the scripts.
I studied Chinese, and modern mainland Chinese is written left to right and a pain for lefties to pass Chinese exams with. But the IMEs are great so you never have to write them out yourself, so you just need to focus on how the word sounds and what it looks like.
Not sure if it can be found online, but there is a hand position trick that allows left-handed people to "drag" the pencil instead of pushing which makes it much closer to right-handed motions.
I am left-handed and my handwriting is terrible, but my partner is also left-handed and her handwriting is very nice but she position her hands as described above to "pull", so clearly it can be done if you apply yourself.
She also hand writes a lot more while I am almost exclusively typing these days so practice definitely helps.
I'm left handed and all my life people need to decode painfully what I'm writing. Most lefties write like trash that's reality
Most people write like trash if they started school after the school computer revolution. It's just about practise. I'm right handed and my handwriting is also realy bad. I started with computers much earlier than others in my class. The people in my class were pretty good, including the lefties. The English teacher was really bad but we got the explanation to that one: When he was young he was forced to switch from left to right hand. This was before the whip was outlawed as a teaching instrument...
Most people write like trash, but I am also left handed and haven't noticed a correlation between handedness and handwriting. For what it's worth, I have very good penmanship.
Learn to type? I never got over my penman ship problem, I just learnt to type and printed all my exams in college. And then it didn’t matter much after school since I would mostly type anyways.
If I had to do it over again, I would probably force myself to write right handed. It should be possible to get used to it, but that would really be a choice they have to make for themselves.
My english teacher was forced to switch from left to right when he was young and his writing was the worst in school. This was before the computer revolution so he did write all the time.
I know it isn’t ideal, but I just like the idea of seeing t what I’m doing. Like the extra vision you get with contacts as opposed to glasses.
Some lefties have some tricks for that, have you looked into them? I'm no expert on the topic, just know there is some tricks to learn :-)
Perhaps you could feel more comfortable using a 'right to left' language for handwriting.
What? I don't think learning a new language like Arabic is the solution to their problem. Something like the Sarasa Dry so that they don't leave smudges on their hand might be more reasonable.
Not disagreeing with your points here in this context, but it's interesting to note that I learned touch typing on a typewriter in school and I know which letters I've missed when typing, and can happily copy pages of text without needing to see the screen - even to correct any errors.
I wonder if that's lost with this paper's method of typing.
I learned on a Mac. The course material was copying from a book without looking at the screen, then correcting the errors. This second pass to correct mistakes is different, and it's not clear that you can be removed when taking notes without affecting learning.
I generally don't look at a screen when I'm typing, I know how to touch type perfectly, I learned to type using mavis beacon in the 90s and you'd get a very low grade in computers if you couldn't touch type.
If you don’t look at either the screen or keyboard, how do you adjust for variations between keyboards?
I regularly switch between a laptop keyboard, standard external keyboard, and ergonomic (curved/split) external keyboard, including switching between ANSI/ISO keyboard layouts (my country defaults to ISO but my MacBook has ANSI). After each switch I generally need a bit of time to adjust, and type quite a bit of errors for the first half-hour or so.
Especially when I have to type special symbols like backslash and percent, which move quite a bit between keyboards.
Oh for sure, if I'm using a keyboard I don't know, then yeah, disregard everything, I probably look at the screen and the keyboard and make a lot of mistakes. I find the mac keyboards all feel pretty much exactly the same, I use a keychron at work, but yeah, to your point, if I walked into a random best buy, I'd probably be awful on the keyboard unless it was a mac or a keychron.
Out of curiosity, why so many keyboards? I work with a dude (lawyer) who takes his keyboard everywhere with him, ha.
Wow. Junk science indeed. "Unforeseen effects on the brain" so you essentially test in a way that is incomparable to those who are experienced typists?
If you're only using one finger to type, of course you're using less brain activity to control that one finger, versus all ten.
I'm unable to read the actual paper, but from the comments here, it sure seems like they worked backwards from an existing premise ("handwriting is better than typing for retaining information") and found a way to make that "truth".
Edit: Missed the link to the article in the comments. Reading it now.
They give a recommendation for education, but didn't measure retention.
I agree with their premise provided students don't know how to touch type (given the anecdotal amount of visual typing I've seen a reason concern for students) it's also interesting that it's cursive, which is being taught less.
There might be no 'normally' remaining any more :
I've heard that in some «almost only words» fields, laptops for students (and projectors for professors) got generalized during lectures (?),
while in math-heavy fields (and I assume, anything involving frequently having to do drawings / schematics), paper for students (and blackboards for professors) were still overwhelmingly used only a few years ago, and I predict are still going to be, until both hardware (e-paper just only barely got colour now !) and software gets much, MUCH better.
I think things like iPads aren't uncommon, at least that's what I was using - but handwriting on an iPad is virtually identical to pen and paper, so no real difference.
We'll have to disagree on that, since IMHO even e-paper falls short of paper (while having other benefits of course)
> How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general?
Exactly… Most people can after training type much faster than they can write with a pen, assuming they’re allowed to use all fingers, which I’d expect to be crucial when comparing them.
> do Norwegian university students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?
Norwegian here: No. We learned cursive in elementary school but most students switched to “block letters” in secondary school. For the past 15+ years, students have also had school computers since secondary school, so about half of their writing went digital since then. (With somewhat negative results, given the attention span of most teens…)
> 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. Participants gave their informed written consent
but is it truly informed consent if it is written with multiple fingers?
I love this with Science. If something would be hard to work with, we just change it until it is easier to measure. That it has no resemblanse with what we were trying to measure is uninteresting.
> when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general
Yeah, the paper claims "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," which is bunk given the methodology.
But this is not handwriting vs typing. It's handwriting vs. "a weird input method none of the participants had ever used before", namely pecking at the keyboard with one finger of one hand.
But if the results were null, would anyone share and repost the article?
Hence “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/
I've been taking notes in a text editor since 1994. What I found was that taking notes via computer was much easier because I could finally keep up with what I'm taking notes about (typing is MUCH faster than writing), and could therefore spend more time considering the thing I'm taking notes on, rearrange things, group them, etc using simple keyboard commands.
My impression is that my retention went way up and I had better understanding overall because I could discover the underlying patterns quicker when I was spending less time and energy encoding my thoughts into words.
During college lectures my retention was highest when I didn’t notes at all. I found that if I took notes, most of my brain power went towards capturing the content instead of actively engaging with it.
Once I stopped taking notes, it freed up my mind to think critically about the material and helped me quickly identify when I was confused about something. When I was confused, I was able to ask the professor about it immediately instead of trying to figure it out on my own after the lecture
A middle ground is just to jot down a few words when something is unclear, just enough to let you know what you need to go back and review.
Not all professors want to take questions during lecture, it works fine in small classes but it can be quite disruptive in a large lecture class when you have a sylabus to stick to in a fixed number of lecture meetings.
What about those key insights you pick up on, and say "Aha!"
Reminds me of the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.
He had the idea of a "trusted system" for capturing things.
Instead of anxiously carrying something important in your head, jot it down and get it off your mind.
Maybe not full notes, but maybe get ready to capture insights.
I am 100% the same.
People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.
That has never been the case for me -- while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer, and then am struggling to catch up, and when I finally figure out what they're explaining again, there's no more time to write it down.
But I can type faster than lecturers speak. And obviously you don't take notes verbatim either, just the gist of a sentence. Then after the seminar is over, I can go over the notes at my own pace to build my understanding. Details that didn't seem that relevant during the seminar, I suddenly realize are key.
I really don't understand why people don't talk about this advantage more.
> People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.
> while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer
That's not the same kind of note-taking. The first is writing for understanding, the second is taking quick notes to avoid missing anything while the lecturer is talking.
No, I'm saying when I missed the last three sentences, now I don't even understand the lecture anymore. There's a variable written on the board and I don't know what it represents.
And then by the time I figure it out, I haven't understood a bunch of previous points that depended on knowing what the variable was.
That's exactly the second kind of quick note taking I was talking about.
When I did my teacher training fifteen or so years ago, we were told that information that was written down by hand was retained for longer than information that was typed. This article seems to correlate with what I was taught.
However, there's no underlying theory to anything in psychology. Psychologists come up with things they call theories, but when you look at them a bit more closely, they're 'just-so stories' that happen to fit some experimental results. The experimental results themselves are shallow correlations between inputs and outputs. Prod the brain in this specific way, and see how it responds. EEG experiments like the one linked only tell us what bits of the brain respond to what stimuli; we don't know what's actually going on in forming a response to that stimulus.
You can point to the ethics protocols by which experimenters are bound to not harm their subjects - these are important and worthy. You can point to the advertising industry's use of psychology to improve its effectiveness, but this is itself a shallow endeavour. As far as improving our understanding the brain as a physical system, the discipline of psychology is much activity with little achievement.
The paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
DOI: doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945
So the study's findings only hold where typewriting means typing "the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard," i.e. like a pigeon.
It looks like this was done because while handwriting is a unihemispheral activity, typing with both hands is not. But it trashes the results from a practical perspective.
Which makes me wonder whether typing with both hands, hence using both hemispheres, actually results in more widespread connectivity in the brain.
Thank you for presented the DOI too.
> The experiment comprised a total of 30 trials, where each word appeared in two different conditions, presented in a randomized order. For each trial, participants were instructed to either (a) write in cursive with their right hand the presented word with a digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard. Before each trial, the instruction write or type appeared before one of the target words appeared, and the participants were given 25 s to either write by hand or type the word multiple times, separated by a space. EEG data were recorded only during the first 5 s of each trial. To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the participant was typewriting. The writings produced by the participants (see Figure 1 for example) were stored for offline analyses.
I wonder what the effect would be when considering:
a) proficiency to write in cursive
b) touch typing ability
Yes I would think that it would be difficult to distinguish between brain activity caused by learning a subject and brain activity caused by learning to write cursive.
Interesting! Explains that even though I've used a laptop since 1992 to do school work because of my learning disabilities(Dysgraphia, mid-line problems, poor fine motor control) I still prefer to hand write my notes. Even if I never read them I noticed that just the act of doing them helps me remember things. I might not remember the source but I can remember the act of note taking. I've noticed the same thing with reading as well.
Multimodality reinforces each other. Action, speech, listening, all helping to let us understand a subject better.
This is why I think AI chatbots have so much potential for education. Every student can have extended dialogue about the topic and really exercise those neurons.
I think the widespread use of that for education would have precisely the opposite outcome that you'd want.
Nothing sinks in to anyones brain because they're not actually talking about it and they don't need to actually learn it for any reason in school because they can just ask the chatbot again at any moment.
I wonder if having offloaded arithmetic to calculators has led to a society that can't do math in their head well enough to make good choices at the supermarket or in other daily situations where simple math would be useful but the situation is too casual to pull out your calculator.
But the impact of that is tiny compared to the prospect of future generations offloading their general ideation and critical thinking to machines instead of just number crunching.
People internalize conversations and the thought processes that went into them. If I have a conversation with somebody, I often walk away remembering and understanding what somebody else said and why they said it. And these memories get used in future interactions. So just like the offloading of arithmetic likely resulted in people not being able to perform mental math, what would be the result of conversing with an AI that has hallucination/logical issues (a lesser intelligence)? Isn't it reasonable to guess that this will result in diminished reasoning?
I hadn't considered that. If that's the case then we should hope people simply copy and paste the output rather than try to engage with it or take it seriously.
Though in more practical economic terms, perhaps what we're being trained for is a future in which the typical worker has a low paying job sanity checking AI output rather than a higher paying job doing the work themself.
and that is a problem because?
i remember when maths teachers would scold me for not knowing my multiplication tables “are you going to carry a calculator around with you every day?” they would say when seeing me use one. Turns out i do.
That is such a tired, boring, selective memory meme. Did you not use a calculator later on in your education, say high school, for stuff like graphing and helping with equations? Do you not think educators in primary school teaching basic arithmetic knew about that?
All our maths education is based on lies which are progressively disclosed. You’re told we can’t go below zero, that numbers are integers, that you can’t take the square root of a negative number… And slowly are introduced to all those concepts building on what you learned before.
And yet this meme of “hur dur, mah teachers saids I’d haves no calculators on me but I use a phone all the time, epic fail” prevails instead of pondering for two seconds that maybe your teacher was giving a cookie-cutter argument that a literal child could comprehend but be unable to refute so they could continue with the damn lesson.
And as if people use calculators that often. They don’t. Yet being able to do some basic arithmetic is useful in such simple areas as shopping, to make more informed decisions in a world that is constantly trying to trick you.
Technological progress requires that we adapt education at the same time. We can still teach the ability to reason through problems when necessary, but still utilize technology when useful
If there is a good reason to, yes. To chase the latest trends (which is what all this EduLLM talk is all about) then definitely not.
That would not be a side effect of the dialogue, but from awareness of the wider world.
I think AI chatbots could help but only if that is an additional modality to learn and doesn’t trump all the classical ones becoming the main mode. That would be disastrous to learning IMO, nothing will stick because users will internalize they could ask the bot to reason it for them, something like “why remember all that trivia when you could just google it”.
Could a factor be that most people primarily typewrite now so it’s second nature muscle memory but the handwriting task requires just a little extra effort? I didn't see preexisting disposition factored in at all, so I’m curious.
I think it's actually the opposite - most people can't touch type, so they spend more time and concentration trying to type, which means less focus on the actual content. I would think that handwriting is more muscle memory for most people, thus they can focus more on what they're writing, making connections to it, etc.
There aren’t any information in this study about if there were any touch typists. This would be an interesting variable to test for.
The typewriting participants were explicitly not touch typing - they were instructed to... type with a single index finger...
> participants were instructed to either (a) write in cursive with their right hand the presented word with a digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard.
> The typewriting participants were explicitly not touch typing - they were instructed to... type with a single index finger...
Looks like this did this because "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," since handwriting is done with one hemisphere.
Still weird.
That might not be enough without any assessment of the subject's typing skill. Touch typists have effectively memorized the keyboard layout and would need less effort to find the key to type, even if limited to one finger at a time
still people who are touch typists are able to find the characters faster on the keyboard than others. this message is written that way to test that out, in parts where it was possible.
however, in my case the blank keycaps did make the task a bit more difficult. i would write faster in cursive, and it might feel less effort.
also the reason was outlined:
> 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.
btw, this post was quite frustrating to write.
> most people can't touch type,
While, statistically, that may be strictly true across the population, I suspect, in the main, people who are in an educational environment where note taking is a requirement can touch type.
I don't recall meeting anyone in the modern office—irrespective of department or title—in the last 25 years who can't touch type.
I didn't read the paper but does this mean if one learns to touch type then there's no difference?
I'm not saying that, but I think it would bear consideration, which the study does not do.
I think the difference in pressure holding the pen or pencil and the dexterity required to form letters still activates way more of the brain than simple touch type would.
I do feel there's a leap in the ability to remain in flow while typing once you're past a certain (high) level of proficiency. Looking at what you're typing really interrupts flow for me, at least when writing prose.
If I have a lot of writing to do, I almost always write longer passages with my eyes either closed or gazing at something other than the screen. When my thought is complete I open my eyes and do a few edits on whatever typos made it through.
I also do almost all of my writing in vim, so I never have to context switch between mouse and keyboard.
I tried for a few minutes to find the HN thread where somebody refuted the "handwriting is better than typing" for fact recall claim.
OTOH, IIRC,
- EEG measures brain activation. It takes more of the brain to hand write than to type, and so it is unsurprising that there is more activation during a writing by hand activity than during a typing activity.
- Do brain connectivity or neural activation correspond to favorable outcomes?
- Synaptic pruning eliminates connectivity in the brain; and that is presumably advantageous.
- Hyperconnectivity may be regarded as a disadvantage in discussions of neurodiversity. Witness recall from a network with intentional hyperconnectivity; too distracted by spurious activations?
- That's a test of dumb recall, which is a test of trivia retention.
- Is rote memorization the pinnacle of learning? To foster creative thinking and critical thinking, is trivia recall optimization ideal?
- (Isn't it necessary to forget so much of what we've been taught in order to succeed.)
- Is spaced repetition as or more effective than hand writing at increasing recall compared to passively listening?
- With persons who have injury and/or disability that prevents them from handwriting, do they have adaptations that enable them to succeed despite "having to" type instead?
- We don't hand write software; though some schools teach coding with pen and paper (and that somewhat reduces cheating, which confounds variance in success and retention).
- We write tests for software; we can't efficiently automatedly test software for quality and correctness unless the code is typed.
- Does anything ever grade, confirm, reject, or validate handwritten notes?
- Are there studies of this that measure recall after typing, and then after handwriting, too?
Edit: A, measure, B, measure; AND: B, measure, A, measure
> I tried for a few minutes to find the HN thread where somebody refuted the "handwriting is better than typing" for fact recall claim.
You would have found it, had you written it down.
Kidding aside, is this the one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42288545
The one I recall had citations, I think
I feel like this has been said before quite a bit but a lot of people always make excuses about how they’re the exception.
Or not everyone is the same (even ignoring the.. interesting stud design of the paper that excluded touch typists).
When I would learn vocabulary in school for a secondary language, the teacher would always state how this is best done by writing everything by hand. I never ever saw observed that benefit and always felt that to be true for me.
So I might be delusional, or there is something else at play here.
That’s true, but not everything is about recall.
Sometimes you just want to record the information quickly in a searchable way and forget about it until the next time you need it.
Not being able to recall something you do not want to might be a feature, and so is increasing the machine ability to recall it (as opposed to yours). Grepping text is always going to be more efficient than scanned handwritten paper notes.
My the exception?
Oops. Thanks
Neither handwriting nor typewriting existed while the brain evolved.
Why does the more modern method have to be the bad one again?
Genes that promote improved written communications could have been selected for even if you use cuneiform as the starting timeframe you are considering. Of course that isn't the real starting time. Cave paintings are 40k years old. How long ago did we begin drawing in the dirt with sticks?
> Neither handwriting nor typewriting existed while the brain evolved.
Why is that relevant?
Maybe typewriting correlates with the way neurons fire.
nerve impulse -> finger impluse -> letter typed.
Meanwhile handwriting requires fluid 3d motion of a multitude of muscles.
Just a note about “ so all participants had to "type using the right index finger [only]"…I should have put this in the title however lots of people over the age of 50 type like this i.e. my parents
I was forced to handwrite my whole school life and was forced to switch off of cursive when teachers decided they didnt want to read it so writing was very slow and painful for me. Typing blew open my ability to think because I could just bash out what I needed written down immediately and then edit as I saw fit instead of just missing my window to write something down and like not retaining it at all.
I'm visually impaired and not being able to write in a notebook is one of the relatively few things I actually miss.
I made a point in college of taking handwritten notes (focusing on what I didn't know) and handwritten test cheat-sheets (even if they weren't allowed, simply as an exercise in summarizing). It helped in memorization and understanding tremendously.
Linking this thread, because it already crossed my mind so many times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29863108
Since that thread, did you try tablets and eInk/ePaper devices?
Tablet, yes.
As for reading, definitely better to read in the train than a phone screen. As for writing, didn't try
As an anecdote, I memorize things very easily when I write them down by hand but typing never has the same effect.
Studies like this are why I lost my respect for the field, and left it a long time ago. I have not since regained my respect for psychology as a general field. Things like this are published all too frequently.
It is demonstrated that playing piano has positive effects on neural development, a task largely analogous to typing. Learning / honing any novel skill will have that effect. If you are pushing your the limits of your knowledge or skill-set and are improving, then your brain has to be adapting to things.
If one group is simply typing characters, one at a time, using one finger, of course nothing is going on in the brain. What aspect of the brain at that point is begin challenged? If anything I'd expect this task to result in a reduction of connectivity.
Takes more brain cells to handwrite. I'd be interested in brain activity of qwerty vs dvorak keyboards, now there's a study
When handwritng you use some additional brain pathways to finely coordinate the hand. When typing you don’t need that but use a different one that learned the keyboard. I think using both is good to reinforce that knowledge.
Crappy science aside, I second the findings, sort of.
I always carry a notebook/pen with me, writing/drawing helps my brain process information in a way that doesn't happen with a keyboard. Whiteboards are even better, if slightly less portable.
Hey now dimwits, it's not like I'm forcing anyone, just sharing my experience.
IN MICE.
Yeah, sounds honestly very obvious. Writing by hand is much more complicated than writing with a typewriter. However, nothing about the brain activity suggests that the increased learning effect has anything to do with the content of what is written. I propose that the increased brain activity is exclusively because one learns _to write_, but not what is written.
Now do it with a Dvorak or Colemak layout. lol.
The link sends me to an empty page that wants me sign to sign up to upload PDF files to an AI tool. It's not clear what this tool is for, or what relation, if any, it has to the headline.
Flagged.
HN's software uses the canonical URL when it finds one and in this case it was bad (https://www.openread.academy/paper/reading?corpusId=null). We've reversed that now.
...so, do i need to register to be able to see the article? (i see a blank page with the text "Someone has a copy - request"...)
Fixed now - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42290219 for explanation.
This has been known for a long time...
And the point is ?
In the age of AGI why is handwriting recognition still so bad and not a mainstream technology?
Why do I still have to painstakingly write math formulas in LaTeX instead of just writing them by hand?
Why don't we write computer code by hand instead of typing it in and struggling with encodings?
We have face/object recognition and audio recognition which is often better than humans. But handwriting recognition is still quite lacking. Are there technical reasons for that or is our monopolistic IT industry just focusing on the things nobody needs like Metaverses, Augmented Reality and Chatbots?
I think the base premise of this comment is wrong? Apple has had many features like this available for a long time and it's hard to think of many things that are more mainstream technology. You can input text, equations and what have you with the Apple Pencil, you can scan your handwritten notes to text in Notes, etc, it's all already there.
Write code... by hand?
This is surely not a serious suggestion, right?
Oh my god writing code by hand would be awful. I can type so much faster than I can write, and my hand doesn't start to hurt after a few words like it does when I write. Plus, how would code completion work with handwriting?
I hate handwriting with a passion
Because writing by hand is slower for most people, and makes editing difficult?