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Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

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Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#31
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.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#32
"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?)

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#33

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.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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”.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#35
post #32

"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…

> 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.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#36
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.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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?

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#39
post #32

"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…

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.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#40

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.
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