14/06/2026
Handwriting changes the brain the way typing cannot. Handwriting and reading are directly linked.
A Norwegian neuroscientist named Audrey van der Meer has spent the better part of 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways that typing physically cannot.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the study that essentially closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is significant enough that, in a sane world, it should have already changed every classroom on the planet.
For the experiment, she recruited 36 university students and fitted each one with a cap of 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity in real time. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote each word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full 5 seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had been ignoring for years, which is how the different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and talking to itself.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern more or less collapsed. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier simply weren't there anymore on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion, it's a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, your wrist, your vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws almost all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has very little to integrate and almost no problem to solve. As van der Meer put it in her interviews, pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way.
She also pointed out that children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like B and D apart, because they have never physically felt with their own bodies what it actually takes to produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at exactly the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments. Half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled, half took notes by hand, and then everyone was tested on what they actually understood from the lectures they had just watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing far more total content but processing almost none of it as they went.
The handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Ultimately, handwriting makes the brain work, and typing lets it coast.
Interestingly, this is a story about embodiment, and about how much of what we call "thinking" is actually a whole-body act that we have been quietly outsourcing to screens for years now. I teach this in my Embodied Sensemaking work.
The brain is not a computer, but part of a living system that includes your hands, your eyes, your nervous system, and the felt sense of moving through space. Every time we replace an embodied act with a frictionless digital one, we get a little more efficient at the surface level and a little more disconnected from the depth that actually makes a piece of information stick, or a feeling get processed, or a decision get integrated. This, to me, is also training us to think less in terms of systems and complexity, and more in terms of cheap takes and surface level talking points.
The nice part of this, there is a fix... write more with your hand.
