denken mit der hand

content/post/2023/09/denken-mit-der-hand.md

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+---
+title: "Denken mit der Hand"
+date: 2023-09-08T14:15:00+02:00
+categories:
+  - learning
+tags:
+  - journaling
+  - writing
+---
+
+Denken mit der Hand---Leuchtturm's slogan for their [1917 notebook series](https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/denken-mit-der-hand/leuchtturm1917/denken-mit-der-hand/)---is, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite accurate. Over the years, [journaling](/tags/journaling) has helped me countless times to do many things: capture ideas, slowly but surely marinate, cross-polinate, develop, and help publish them, cope with daily life, record events and milestones I don't want to forget, and facilitate my learning. When it comes to the German and Dutch _Denken_ or thinking, that last one is especially relevant. Every single thing I've ever done started out with pen and paper. 
+
+People don't really write anymore. That's a damn shame. Not just because I like writing and can't find any snail mail pen pals, but because writing _is_ Denken mit der Hand! No single keyboard will ever replace that, and no single digital device will ever come close to emulating its thinking-enhancement capabilities. The handwriting of my students gets worse by the year: it's clear that they don't write at all except at exams when they have to. There, _old man yells at clouds_! 
+
+Let's level the field. Instead of me yelling at clouds, how about me summarizing published scientific evidence of the superiority of Denken mit der Hand instead of mit der Tastatur (keyboard)? Here goes. 
+
+**The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking** by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2014). Their results:
+
+> The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. [...] students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.
+
+In other words, note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject. To be fair, laptop note-taking isn't the problem. The problem is blindly copying what's being said, which obviously can be done much quicker when typing fast on a keyboard than writing with a pen. Therefore, students resort more often to transcribing when on a laptop. And precisely that seems to be a bad idea to facilitate learning:
+
+> [... ] the tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.
+
+**Writing by hand or digitally in first grade: Effects on rate of learning to compose text** by Spilling et al. (2023). Researchers found no specific evidence for or against digital writing for first graders that learn to write for the first time. I think this shows how important it is to take context into account: first graders aren't asked to summarize, compose, rebuild and extrapolate knowledge. They're simply asked to write their first few sentences. That's not _Denken_. 
+
+**Why Writing by Hand Could Make You Smarter** by William R. Klemm cites a 2009 study on the role of the sensorimotor learning in the perception of letter-like forms. In it, researchers study how we learn by compacting and summarizing information. Our brain does this by what they call "functional specialization": optimizing for efficiency. In addition, when cursive writing,
+
+> [...] the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of brain become co-activated during the learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.
+
+That means more parts of our brain is activated during writing compared to typing. I found that a bit odd: isn't movement control also needed to correctly type on a keyboard? I do love the sensation of writing, especially when writing with a [fountain pen](/tags/fountain-pens), but I know some folks who find typing on a mechanical keyboard to be satisfactory as well. Are these two different kinds of the aforementioned "sensation"? 
+
+**Modes of writing in a digital age: the good, the bad, and the unknown** by Anne Mangen (2018). Future reading and writing will inevitably be more screen-based instead of hand-based, as our ever evolving technological advances carry us further and further away from pen and paper. Mangen summarizes existing research and concludes that we shouldn't just throw our analog writing material out of our windows:
+
+> [...] based on extant empirical research, it seems worth pausing to reflect on the ways in which different technologies---tools and substrates---affect the ways in which we engage, cognitively and emotionally, with whatever we read, write and communicate.
+
+In the [publicly available article](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/9419/7593#p6), she mentions several different aspects that point towards increased (and linked) brain activity when taking out that pen. Below is a selection of reasons why to write, as highlighted by Mangen:
+
+- Handwriting requires the integration of visual, haptic, and tactile information---hence, motor commands and kinesthetic feedback are closely linked to visual information when we write by hand, while this is not the case with typewriting.
+- Alexander Lurija calls the formation of letters with particular shapes and sizes "kinetic energy" that helps facilitate, among others, motor support. 
+- [...] they (Longcamp et al., 2008) found that those who had learned to write the letters by hand performed better on memory tasks and visual recognition tasks.
+- [...] for certain writing tasks, the speed of handwriting comes with a perhaps unexpected flip side. When used for note-taking, the fact that we can type practically as fast as someone speaks, may have as a consequence that note-taking turns into mere copying and, this way, ends up supporting shallow retention of facts rather than deeper comprehension. (See Mueller and Oppenheimer above!) According to Mangen herself: [...] the writer may be focusing mostly on the screen. In this respect, typewriting may be described as more abstract and phenomenologically detached than writing by hand. This division makes it easier to separate thinking from listening, which might or might not be a good thing. 
+
+---
+
+To conclude, there's something special involved when a writing instrument tenderly gripped between our fingers touches the paper and starts making intricate swirls that ultimately form inky words, sentences, and schematics. This seemingly mundane operation, that nowadays is easily dismissed in favor of a hyper-modern scissor or mechanical keyboard, in reality involves a plethora of brain activities that work together in magical and complex ways. 
+
+I prefer my Denken the way people have been thinking for thousands of years---mit der Hand (said the digital blogger who wrote this on a MacBook Air).