MPut the keyboard, smartphone or tablet aside and go back to writing by hand in notebooks, notebooks, diaries and diaries. An exercise that should be practiced not only by “vintage souls” but by everyone: it’s not about demonizing technology, far from it, but about getting back into a habit perhaps ancient and obsolete but still effective very good for your brain, memory and learning, especially for the little ones. As demonstrated by a recent study conducted by the Norwegian University.
Handwriting at the center of a Norwegian study
The days of “beautiful handwriting notebooks” with pages full of letters written in italics, uppercase or lowercase seem to be long gone. Today the new generations, but not only them, no longer write by hand. However, with inevitable consequences. The first impacts memory: it is well known that writing by hand helps you memorize the content better, a detail not to be underestimated especially when you are a student. But it’s not just memory that’s involved. Writing on paper and with a pen activates brain connectivity not used when writing on the PC.
«Manual writing is a real motor act that it allows you to activate not only two types of memories, narrative and implicit procedural, and helps to focus and rationalize thoughts better. Two fundamental components both when you are a student and as an adult” he explains Luca Proietti, psychotherapist and psychiatrist. A result that was scientifically proven during a study conducted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and then published on Frontiers in Psychology.
To understand how much the brain is involved, and in which areas, during manual writing, researchers studied neural networks demonstrating that the brain connectivity patterns involved are much more complex than when typing on a keyboard. In other words, during the experiment it was highlighted that, while the activity of the regions celebrating them increased when the students involved wrote by hand, it completely disappeared when they switched to the keyboard.
Learn by writing by hand
It has therefore been shown that focusing on controlled hand movements to use the pen, carefully writing the letters allows you to simultaneously memorize and learn what you are writing. Furthermore, as Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and co-author of the study, points out, these results also explain another problem, which especially involves the little ones: the reason why learning to read and write on electronic tablets promotes dyslexia and misfortune.
In fact, children often have difficulty memorizing mirrored letters, like the “b” and the “d” or to make spelling errors, to not knowing how to produce a long and detailed text, to also not having the perception of space and spatial organization, precisely because they write very little by hand.
The mental and emotional benefits of handwriting
But it is not just a teaching question. As the expert explains, sWriting by hand also allows you to elaborate your thoughts: «Writing with pen and paper is first of all asensory experience that often gives very positive sensations. Furthermore, the act of putting pen to paper allows you to express one’s experience, to organize it by putting it in order, but also to elaborate it. It is no coincidence that during many therapies it is often recommended to write about one’s emotions and feelings in order to rationalize them.”
Diaries, letters, anger letters widely used during a therapeutic process, they help to “let out” one’s feelings, especially the negative ones, and to put what has happened back into the right perspective. This act activates the aforementioned narrative memory but also the implicit procedural one because “you are concentrated on writing and doing it well”.
The activation of theta waves
But there is also another advantage to writing by hand: theactivation of theta waves. These are those waves that are activated when a slow activity takes place: «They are deep waves that denote deep relaxation. Writing requires you to get in touch with yourself, dedicate time to yourself and focus on what you are putting on paper. Like some kind of flow, this action requires greater concentration than writing on the PC and this allows you to relax».
For this reason, the activity of writing by hand, like reading and meditating, is not the only one it calms the minds but stimulates them at the same time. And it must therefore not be forgotten.
iO Donna © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED