A pen is more effective than the keyboard: advantages of handwritten notes over laptop notes.
A pen is more effective than the keyboard: advantages of handwritten notes over laptop notes.
Every day, data-driven digital information plays an increasingly important role. This data increasingly determines our everyday lives and is replacing analog processes more and more. The proportion of what is written by hand continues to decline. According to scientific background, we are not doing ourselves any favors in the long term. Why is that?
Entering texts with the keyboard is tempting; a large amount of information can be captured digitally in a shorter time. These texts can be easily corrected, rearranged or expanded and recalled at any time. The problem with this is that when typing, humans tend to capture what they hear 1:1, a purely auditory-motor process. When writing by hand, we have to concentrate on the essentials, we think about what to write and what not to write.
Worth noting is the aspect that we rarely reread digitally written material intensively, which means that we rarely build up further trains of thought through what we have read.
Studies show that we are much more creative during the process of writing by hand, that the ability to learn and remember is increased. Handwriting is and remains essential. Brain activity during handwriting is considerably greater than during typing because spatial orientation is involved in addition to complex micromotor skills.
There are neuroscientific studies that show that handwriting is also of great importance for creativity and content comprehension. There is a study with students showing that those who typed notes during a lecture were less able to process the content than those who took handwritten notes.
It is imperative in our digital world that almost everyone interact with some form of digital technology to perform a variety of different routine activities, such as
z. e.g., authority activities, routine tasks, or learning and knowledge tasks.
Currently, however, a disconnect exists between analog handwriting on paper, which is integrated into everyday life, and digital technologies. With the gyropen, we want to close this gap and thus create an interaction technology that puts people at the center of their activities and connects the analog and digital worlds.
Sources:
James, K. H., & Engelhardt, L. (2019). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 15, 41-51. doi: 10.1016/j.tine.2019.01.002.
S. Oviatt, A. Cohen, A. Miller, K. Hodge, and A. Mann: The Impact of Interface Affordances on Human Ideation, Problem Solving, and Inferential Reasoning. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 19, 2012.
P. A. Mueller and D. M. Oppenheimer: The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science (2014).