Can We Reprogram our Brains?

Yesterday I read an article in The New York Times titled "What Killed Penmanship?" The teaching of cursive handwriting has fallen out of favor in schools, and been dropped from many state curricula. The reasons cited are obvious: we are living in the digital age; we spend so much time on our smartphones, tablets, and computers, that hardly anyone needs to be able to write by hand anymore, and certainly not "beautifully". Today, the most handwriting that many people do is to scrawl a note to themselves, or write a grocery list (though even I use my phone for that!) - so it's hard to justify forcing kids to learn to write well by hand, practicing all those loops and consistent slants. However, the article went on to talk about a site on Reddit called "Penmanship Porn" where people post and look at examples of beautiful handwriting, and also about remedial courses some people are taking, as adults, to try to improve their penmanship, or even learn how to write in a way that might make a splash on that Reddit site.

This is all quite interesting to me, as a former calligrapher, and granddaughter of a teacher of the Palmer Method who instilled that exemplar of cursive into me at a young age. I still have some of the Palmer Method pens she used - the kind with a nib you inserted and then dipped into an inkwell. Imagine that. My own handwriting, however, has deteriorated a lot over the past thirty years: proportionately, no doubt, with the marked improvement in my typing.

I'm not as concerned about whether or not kids learn cursive handwriting in schools from a motor-skills viewpoint -- after all, no one can argue that there's not major dexterity involved in typing on a phone with both thumbs at high speed, and most young people seem amazingly good at that. The brain's ability to form ideas and thoughts and transform them into words is probably not hugely different when the end result is written with a pen than when it's typed - although, let's admit it -- there's a big difference between texting and writing a long, thoughtful letter to a friend. 

But because the development of writing, as symbols made by hand, was such a critical part of human development itself, I do suspect that some sort of evolutionary neural pathway is no longer being used when we do not use our hands in this way. Maybe another question to ask is, "What Else Died when We Killed Off Penmanship?" I'm being somewhat facetious: plenty of people, like my left-handed husband, never learned cursive handwriting, and that fact didn't interfere with either his dexterity or creativity. It's not cursive that's at issue: it's what happens when we write words and thoughts down by hand. It's a slower process, related to drawing, that requires us to think carefully -- there's no delete button -- and use fine-motor coordination, as our brains navigate a complex communication pathway between mind, eye, and hand -- and from there to the intended recipient of whatever we wanted to record or communicate.

What specialized and complex tasks DO we actually use that mind-eye-hand pathway for, anymore? We brush our teeth and dress ourselves, we might prepare some food; some of us play sports; we certainly type. But fewer and fewer people play instruments, learn to draw, learn to write beautifully, know how to do needlework or woodworking, make a really good meal from scratch without taking all night, throw a clay pot, know how to fix their own cars or a leaking faucet -- the list goes on. Cars are a good example -- even if someone might want to learn how to service their own car, most vehicles have become so complex, with computer-controlled systems, that it's not even possible. In this sort of world, where the knowledge, desire, and need to do such things are disappearing, I wonder if the human being isn't becoming something quite different from what we were in all the preceding centuries. How are our brains changing in the process?

When I searched for information on this topic, it's predictably voluminous, but also rather vague. Scientists acknowledge that technology has contributed to weaker memories, attention spans, and information-processing ability. On the other hand, so many tasks that we once had to do in our heads, slowly and carefully, have become rapid and automatic -- and who doesn't prefer that? Going back to the old ways has become inconceivable.

But in terms of the loss of specific practices like handwriting or drawing, there is less written. What science does know is that our brains adapt and change in response to external stimuli but also what we tell them to do: we actually have some control over this. Repeated behavior reinforces certain neural pathways, and causes disused ones to atrophy -- though in many cases this can be reversed. Being repeatedly exposed to disturbing media that upsets us, for instance, can cause our brains to form pathways that automatically end up stimulating negative thoughts, worry, and stress.  When we are under stress, certain hormones are also released that affect our bodies. One of the best ways to interrupt this destructive process is to reprogram our brains through making time for creative activities that help us to focus and concentrate in different ways.  When we draw, write by hand, doodle, play an instrument, knit or sew, whittle a piece of wood, make a paper collage or scrapbook -- as when we meditate, or do yoga -- we are giving our brains a break and stimulating them to strengthen positive pathways, relax our bodies, and decrease stress. But those activities need to become a regular practice in order to have a real effect.

While these kinds of activities have declined since their last resurgence in the 60s and early 70s, it does seem to me that there is a counter-reaction now, and that more and more people want to step away for a while, slow down, and learn to do something contemplative -- and perhaps also useful or beautiful -- with their hands and bodies, perhaps driven to it by wanting something, anything, that will help with the anxiety of living in our chaotic world and the constant barrage of upsetting news. Last week I went to an evening meeting of a new knitting club at the local library -- and it was eye-opening. More about that in a subsequent post!

Comments

[Peter]

I am left-handed, and my grade-school teachers merely observed that I wasn’t getting it and gave me bad grades in penmanship. Probably they knew there was no help for my problem — though they refused to accept my experiment in backhand. I became famous in my senior year for choosing the multiple choice option on the English regents test and getting it almost all right — not because I was so confident of my knowledge of literature but because I knew I would suffer because my handwriting was awful. You can imagine my delight in knowing the QWERTY typing system favors the left hand.

[Lorianne]

I still keep a handwritten (cursive) journal, and I write longhand (in cursive) when I do timed writing with my students. (The majority of them type on laptops, which is okay.)

I don't have scientific proof, but I *believe* I think *differently* when I write with a pen in hand vs. typing on a keyboard. I spend a lot of time typing on a laptop, and a lot of time tapping with my thumbs on a phone...but writing by hand *feels different.*

It feels slower: if I want to blog something I wrote in my journal, I have to write it, then type it, then revise. I think of this old-school process as being akin to slow food: doing things fast is fine, but making things slowly by hand has a "homey" and more personal feel.

This is part of the reason I love writing Postcards to Voters: it feels like sending something handmade to a stranger, and the *process* of writing by hand feels meditative to me.

For my postcards, I print rather than writing in cursive since some young folks can't read cursive. I think of cursive as being a special code for us elders. :-)

[Dale]

The last couple months I've been studying classical Greek, largely by copying out texts by hand, and I've been surprised by how calming and restorative a practice it has been.

I was unable to learn to write cursive: my only major failure in school. At the time I let people think that I was too arrogant and impatient to fiddle with it, but it was sheer inability, and I still can't do it -- thinking about where I will need to leave off one letter so as to be in the proper place to start another destroys my ability to write either, and I end up with a surly jagged misshapen mess. I switched to printing, which I could do fluently and legibly, and I stayed with it until overtaken by the digital tide.

So my history with handwriting is unfortunate. But I love forming the Greek letters: they're full of ancient magic -- so old and so beautiful. There's a sense of coming home, of slowing down to human pace. I get to the end of a sentence, look back at it, and marvel that I, or anyone, ever learned to do such a thing.

[Beth]

Peter, haha, I never thought about QWERTY favoring the left hand, but of course it does! It's telling that most of the people responding to this post (here, on FB, or by email) were either lefties or those who had trouble with cursive writing -- and made whatever accommodations they had to in order to get through school. (or maybe I just have a lot of left-handed friends??)

Thanks for this, Lorianne! Yes, slowing down is one advantage, and I also agree with your observation about the homey quality of writing by hand. As for reading cursive, one of the arguments against dropping the requirement was that without a knowledge of cursive, students wouldn't be able to read the Declaration of Independence anymore. I guess it, too, will be considered a "special code for us elders"!

Hi Dale, it's good to hear from you! I'm so happy to hear more about your classical Greek studies and especially this comment about writing the Greek letters. I feel the same way about them: there's something beyond symbolic, beyond beauty, in these ancient symbols, and writing them has always given me great pleasure. You may know that I've been studying modern Greek, for which the only real benefit of having studied the ancient language is knowing the letterforms (well, not entirely, but it must be like Latin and Italian). Seeing pages of vocabulary words or conjugations in my own handwriting still seems magical to me, and seeing carved inscriptions or Greek letters on an ancient vase feels even more so.

[Rajani]

It may be completely different, the way one thinks and writes when there is no delete button or backspace... you evoke nostalgia for handwritten letters in inked cursive.

[Roderick]

Handwriting was, for me, a curse at school. Occasionally, and quite casually, I was beaten (back of head, alternate palms, backside) for passages even I couldn't always read read back. Journalism meant typewriters, but it also meant the fiddle of feeding in two sheets of paper which acted as the bread for a carbon-paper sandwich. Too much x-ing out and one had to start all over again. The deletion key on a word-processor keyboard arrived like a ray of sunshine after a seemingly endless rain storm.

Yes, calligraphy looked nice but to me it slowed down comprehension. More fun for the writer than the reader. Even when computer fonts included scripts which were, of course, unvarying in their shape. Perhaps I never wrote anything that was worth a pinch of salt but it was always readable. My faults were there for all to see.

[Jumpringer]

Looking forward to your post about the knitting club. I recently attended a week long knitting class at an folk arts school and loved it.