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Put Away The Keyboard: Handwriting Makes You Smarter
A plain-English summary of the brain-imaging research on handwriting — showing what lights up in a child's brain when they form letters by hand vs. tap them on a screen.
Read the original (PDF)Key findings
- Brain scans show widespread neural activation during handwriting that simply does not happen during typing.
- Children who write letters by hand learn to recognize and read those letters faster.
- Touchscreens and keyboards skip the motor-learning step the brain expects.
Why this matters
Tablets are not a substitute. The motor act of forming a letter is what teaches the brain what that letter is.
Topics
handwritingbrain-imagingscreen-time
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