October 2023
Most of us these days type everything, using handwriting rarely, but research is showing that handwritten notes, during lectures, for instance, improves our capacity to remember what is said as well as helping us generate new ideas. It is in the complex hand-eye motor coordination with spatial and tactile information associated with writing by hand on physical paper plus the brain stimulation of this that highlights what we are doing. The hands really do have it.
A Japanese 2021 study of university students and recent graduates has revealed that writing on physical paper can lead more effective memory of the information delivered an hour later. This contrasted with those students who typed their notes. They remembered what they had written for only one hour after the lecture had finished, and then their memory faded. The information heard by the handwriters endured for much longer.
Writing by hand activated more regions of the brain, according to EEG studies, creating optimal conditions for learning. Interestingly, it’s been found that children with disabilities learn better when they learn to write by hand. Writing by hand increases one’s capacity to remember and generate ideas more effectively but those who typed only learned only at a superficial level.
Now, all this makes a lot of sense. I remember in the copious notes I wrote by hand during lectures that I also incorporated related and sometimes obverse ideas into my text, as well as questions to myself, stars and doodles and other indicators of valuable and yet sometimes extraneous material. Handwriting the lectures took on an almost four dimensional level and I found that I didn’t need to study those notes particularly in order to remember the various facts I needed. I used to sort of wonder if perhaps I was being lazy when I’d find that others were spending hours studying their notes, and I hardly ever did and I hardly did, because I remembered what I’d written/drawn. That aside, there are physical differences in how handwritten notes are formed versus type written ones. There is no way, the extraneous, the memos to self, the questions I ask myself, etc that are part of handwritten text is possible in the formation of typed text.
Interestingly, and contrary to the popular belief that digital tools increase efficiency, the Japanese study showed that those who used paper completed the note-taking task about 25% faster than those who used digital tablets or smartphones. Me thinks we underestimate ourselves.
Infants reach out with their hands and their hands receive some of the first knowledge of the world. Hands remember not only via touch, but movement. We are born with the impulse to touch and, interestingly, the first movement to connect with another human being is from the baby, not the adult. They reach out, and we respond.
Hands are superbly fine-tuned perceptual instruments. We rely on touch to feel safe and loved. Touch soothes a jagged nervous system. Our body rhythms synchronize through touch, through our hands. Touch can also traumatize, especially when it is unwanted and the memories of this is embedded in the body, but, as Peter Levine (the trauma specialist) says, it is in touch that we can be healed.
Hand perceptions precede words and cognition. These are our first tools to engaging the world. A colleague and mentor of mine, with over 50 years of psychotherapeutic experience is now exploring the knowledge we have of our world as delivered by hand perception. Not only do hands help us to remember, they remember themselves. Think of a potter: the security of remembering through pressure and movement the tension of clay upon the hands allows the vase to almost make itself. Squeezing a ball or pressing your hands together or using worry beads (sometimes used to help anxiety) stimulates our capacity to remember and learn because it increases physiological arousal, a state of attention in which our body is pumped up and focussed and present.
We barely understand the knowing we have in our hands, but herein lies a bounty of barely explored territory and possible healing. The knowing in our hands could be the next psychotherapy.
