While various technological advancements have meant our lives have been made much easier as well as much simpler, some advancements simply do not beat the traditional manner in which we as humans have done stuff from the past and the manner in which also we currently do stuff. And indeed, one of the things that I’m talking about here is as simple as writing on a piece of paper.
Over the course of the past several years, researchers have been engaged in the activity of investigating the differences when it comes to brain activity while we engage in handwriting or typewriting. Some cognitive scientists, in this sense, have gone on to suggest that the neutral processes which happen to be involved in handwriting fundamentally actually involve much greater brain activity in regions of the brain which happen to be linked with the encoding of new information.
But then the question pops up : are all the benefits which happen to be linked with handwriting simply just down to the fact that while we’re engaging in the same, we’re doing so by holding a pen and writing? And if this was to be the case, then wouldn’t the use of a stylus on an electronic tablet result in similar outcomes?
The new research, which happens to have been published in the journal frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, has been set out so as to find and investigate the apparent differences which are present in either of brain activity or memory retention for the sake of information handwritten on a proper notebook versus an electronic tablet. In any case though, particular investigation proceeded on to recruit 48 different students from a university and then proceeded on to split these students into three groups.
Each subject as chosen and mentioned earlier was then told to read a fictional conversation which took place between several students that discussed future academic matters and they were also then tasked with the aim to generate a future schedule for the sake of educational work over the course of the next two months. With the students being divided into groups as mentioned earlier, one group was asked to record their schedules on paper notepads, while the other group was asked to use a tablet with a stylus, and finally, a third group used a smartphone with touchscreen keypad.
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As the one hour mark approached after these groups undertook the specific tasks as mentioned above, each of the participants answered a series of questions which tested their memory of the schedule while the subjects were being scanned in an fMRI machine. This then allowed the researchers to measure brain activity in memory regions which happen to be associated with language and visualization.
It was found that the group of students which were engaged in writing on paper notebooks actually scored slightly better on the memory test when compared with the tablet and smartphone groups. However, the activations in certain brain areas were subject to being significantly higher in the paper group. Activity in regions ranging from the likes of the hippocampus, to the likes of the precuneus, visual cortices as well as other language-related frontal regions of the brain actually suggested that the memory retrieval mechanisms were subject to being more strongly encoded in the group tasked with the paper work.
The researchers, which took responsibility of the study, proceeded on to conclude : “The significant superiority in both accuracy and activations for the Note group suggested that the use of a paper notebook promoted the acquisition of rich encoding information and/or spatial information of real papers and that this information could be utilized as effective retrieval clues, leading to higher activations in these specific regions.”
Although the study does happen to be small as well as limited, the researchers have indeed hypothesized a number of reasons as to why writing on paper could end up being more effective at helping the human brain in storing as well as subsequently retrieving novel information. It seems as if that they key factor that many have deduced happens to be the tactile as well as spatial properties that exist of writing on paper.
The hypothesis then goes on to suggest that it is in fact our hippocampus in particular – which of course is best at integrating the what, where and when of new information. All in all then, it therefore can in fact be concluded that the material properties of paper end up providing a more fixed cure for the sake of memory encoding in comparison to electronic devices.
All in all though, while there certainly is the suggestion that taking notes using the good old fashioned pen and paper could as well be the very best way thereby which you can help your brain remember, this single and small study is by no means at all definitive. And hence, perhaps the biggest question that then comes to mind is whether the prolonged usage of electronic devices, right from a young age counters any of the above associated benefits that result from paper note-taking.
