This is How It Affects the Brain When We Have Stopped Writing by Hand

When was the last time you wrote a letter by hand?

We are living in the age of screens and keyboards. Writing by hand seems like a thing from prehistory, almost reserved for making a shopping list. Email and social networks have ended up banishing manual writing. Until less ago than we think, paper and a simple pen were the protagonists of our daily routine.

But nothing is free in life and giving up manual writing is not free either. The simple act of writing by hand activates three regions of our brain: the cognitive area, the visual area and the motor area.

This is How It Affects the Brain When We Have Stopped Writing by Hand.

It is especially important for younger people since writing improves their motor skills and  refines hand-eye coordination (something that can also be worked on in sports like tennis).

For older people, the habit of writing by hand also provides advantages, especially the improvement of prospective and working memory. Writing stimulates semantic memory, which is where our knowledge of the world is stored. Working memory is also trained since, for example, we get used to keeping an idea in our head while we are in the process of transferring it to paper.

And if we enter the psychological section, writing appears to be an excellent way to channel our emotions. Writing helps us to know ourselves better, to delve into our feelings without limitations, with what this entails, for example in situations of stress or anxiety. Writing helps you leave behind that environment that overwhelms you and have your space to ask yourself your doubts and choose the best path to follow.

Habit of Writing.

The almost definitive abandonment of the habit of writing has been combined with others that have exacerbated the decrease in our mental work. We do not write but we do not exercise our memory either, for example, to remember telephone numbers, addresses or calendar appointments since we carry a cell phone in our pocket that takes care of all this and much more, such as any mathematical calculation that is necessary for us in life daily life. We no longer even count coins to pay or when receiving the return of the purchase since buying with money is almost something residual compared to paying with the card or directly with the mobile phone.

Keep a diary, spend 5 minutes a day making a list of things we are grateful for, writing a fantasy or a story or a letter… Our brain will thank us.