Writing by hand is good for your brain

No, definitely not. Although it depends where you are. If you are near South America etc, then Spanish would be useful to know.

I have used it before when I've lost a phone etc, or if I had no way of contacting someone otherwise. I can think of more dramatic situations too. Technology can be helpful but if you're overreliant on it then that is a potential weakness.

I was cleaning my office a couple of days ago and found stacks upon stacks of paper. I've had a habit for over a decade of taking printer paper, folding it half length-wise, and scribbling notes on it as I work. I use it like a temporary scratch pad. It is an ingrained habit at this point, as soon as I have difficult focused work to do I reach for the paper and pen. Urgent site-wide outage? Start scribbling. Big feature decomposition? Start scribbling.

So I have this massive stack of notes that I glimpse at before shredding or whatever. Nothing of permanent value, nothing that I look at even 24 hours after it is written. But the sheer volume of the writing like that I do surprises me ever time I clean it out. It's like a novella sized stack of paper with server names, sketchy diagrams, peoples names, dates, commit hashes, debug messages. Lots and lots of lists. Things underlined, circled, stars, strike through, arrows, etc.

It is such an ingrained habit that its almost a compulsion, like someone is tying my hand behind my back if I don't have access. It is like my brain needs reassurance that some detail I just noticed won't be lost, at least it will be on the paper if I need it in the next 5 minutes. Like an extension of my short-term memory.

I have also kept a journal for 20+ years, mostly on paper. I often use a fountain pen (Lamy 2000) and notebooks with high-quality paper, but I am not super picky about it. I've used the cheapest school notebooks to the finest Japanese boutique papers. I'm a fan of the Pilot G2 and pens that have a similar feel. I'll also journal in Google Docs, Apple notes, or text docs in VS Code.

It is hard for me to disentangle the supposed benefits from the sheer weight of habit. It is just something I do, part of who I am.

I literally can't think without a pen in my hand. Especially when I'm stuck, writing anything, or even better, drawing, activates my brain cells.

Typing forces you to think linearly, it feels constrained. That's not how the brain works.

It actually is difficult to find an exercise for developing fine motor control that is as complete and as cheap as practicing handwriting.

All other exercises would need more expensive tools and after inventing a sufficient number of different patterns for other activities, that would be practically equivalent with writing a different alphabet on another medium than paper, e.g. carving wood or stone, etc.

I did not like to use handwriting for things like taking notes at school or at the university, and I switched to typewriting as soon as I could afford a computer. For work purposes I now use only typewriting.

Despite this, I am very grateful that in the first years of school I was forced to practice handwriting, even if I have abandoned decades ago the style of handwriting that I was taught.

The reason is exactly what the previous poster has said, that this practice of handwriting as a child was essential for developing the motor control that I needed later as an electronics engineer for soldering or for assembling and disassembling various miniature devices.

When I take notes when typing, I can transcribe the content word-for-word without knowing what I am hearing and without thinking about it.

When I hand write, I am generally forced to either slow down and repeat what I am listening/watching (if an option), or actually think about what is being said, and choose the important parts to write down, or rephrase it in a more efficient-to-write way.

I am taking a course right now and I find repeatedly that I understand the concepts from taking down the notes (many aha moments), and then I remember. I rarely if ever actually look at the notes I take - they are objectively inferior as a product compared to the official course notes or the textbook.

Maybe typing would be efficient for learning if I was bad it - could be an interesting hypothesis to test.