Health – Handwriting and the Brain

The physical act of cursive handwriting, with each letter of a word being connected, actually affects the composer’s/writer’s brain. Children in primary grades are taught to print the letters of the alphabet, then progress to cursive handwriting in third grade. Recently, however, the American school system considers cursive writing a waste of time; emphasis instead has moved to keyboard and computer proficiency. Research shows that there is a loss of brain health and learning when these writing skills are bypassed. The following are excerpts from What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades:

“Psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

“Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters—but how.

“ ‘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.’ …

“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. …

“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. …

“The researchers found that … when children had drawn 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. …

“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. …

“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. …”

www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html

Is any of this by accident? The wily devil is determined and subtle, using everything available and every intellectual—educators, politicians and other influential persons—to dumb down the people as he continues his work of deceit.