Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aozora7 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used paper for anything since I graduated college 10 years ago. Excluding education where I only used paper because I was forced to, closer to 20 years. I would much rather open a text editor or a spreadsheet on PC.

View on HN

And now you brain is damaged.Good job.

Care to elaborate on this take?

Unused parts of your brain die out. Hand writing helps you think.

Isn't it "writing things down" that helps you think? Does it have to be "hand writing" in particular?

Writing things down is handwriting. You perhaps mean “typing things out” as in using a keyboard. You get some benefits from typing things out but you don’t get many others, as handwriting requires you literally think about each letter and word as it is constructed and which actions you need to take to construct the letters and words. If I type, I type it and forget about it by design moving on to the next word not worrying at all about it. Handwriting essentially trains you to see, think, and understand longterm chains of thought; essentially deep focus on what you are doing while thinking about what is coming next. Typing only produces shortterm. Shortterm thought pairs well with brain dumping, such as on Twitter, which ends up being pretty valueless in the longterm.

I wonder how much bias there is in the science here. I certainly can think better with pen and paper versus computer but I’m 45 and my whole schooling through to postgrad was done with pen, paper and blackboard. It seems very plausible that digital natives from childhood will think just as well at a keyboard (maybe better since they’ll be less practiced with pen and paper).

You state this with such conviction, do you have some sources for this? As I wrote in my other comment, that 2014 study is often cited here, but it did not replicate well.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

I’m not sure what you mean by it does not replicate well. You pick up a pen and start writing, ideally in cursive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com