Nowadays, most people type on a keyboard rather than write by hand. Why writing by hand good for your brain?
According to research conducted at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, typing may be faster than writing by hand, but it’s less stimulating for the brain. The report was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
Audrey van der Meer, the study’s co-author and a neuropsychology professor at NTNU said:
“Our main finding was that handwriting activates almost the whole brain as compared to typewriting, which hardly activates the brain as such. The brain is not challenged very much when it’s pressing keys on a keyboard as opposed to when it’s forming those letters by hand,”
“When you have to form letters by hand, an ‘A’ will look completely different than a ‘B’ and requires a completely different movement pattern,”
“Because only small parts of the brain are active during typewriting, there is no need for the brain to communicate between different areas,”
Similar study conducted by Indiana University in 2017 also found:
Handwriting serves to link visual processing with motor experience, facilitating subsequent letter recognition skills.
We encourage our students to write Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji by hand.
It is much simpler to type Chinese characters because you don’t need to memorise the strokes. However, handwriting not only stimulates your brain as stated in the above research, but also helps you memorise Chinese characters.
For people who want to write Chinese characters by hand, we created Chinese character worksheets based on YCT (Young Chinese Test) and HSK (Chinese Language Proficiency Test).
