With the technology we have nowadays, may it be in whatever field, the goal of everyone is to be fast. Alongside with accuracy and efficiency, speed is one of the factors that most people take into consideration every day. With speed, production is doubled and time is maximized. Who wouldn't want that, right? Given these reasons, an increasing rate of people ditching handwriting is increasing at present.
About five years ago, a British organization conducted a survey to measure how many people had given up handwriting. In the news posted by The Guardian, they've stated that among the 2,000 people who participated the study, one-third of them opened up they hadn't written anything yet for about six months before the survey. Now, the number of people who preferred to encode and type their thoughts through keyboards are still rising dramatically.
Handwriting can require you more effort and time, unlike encoding. And it even gets boring sometimes. But did you know that writing with your own hands can also be beneficial?
In recent research conducted by Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, who are both research psychologists, they found out people are losing something important as they ditch handwriting. They were able to do this by investigating the effects of laptops to students when used for note-taking inside their classrooms.
The results of the study showed how students weren't able to grasp a lot of information when using their laptops as their notepad, as reported by Business Insider. But when it comes to taking notes by hand, the researchers learned that the students were able to grasp the most information they need during their class.
Often, as we just encode the things we hear word per word, our brain doesn't engage with the information anymore. Taking notes by hand, on the contrary, since it would require you more time, makes it easier for the brain to understand and remember the information you've gathered, which could accelerate your learning capacity, according to researchers.
"Transcrib[ing] lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning," concludes Mueller and Oppenheimer. Given this, the experts advise students to use their pen and paper instead of their laptops when taking notes as it can open more opportunities of learning for them.
So if you want to become smarter, better use your hands in note-taking. And see the astonishing results for yourself.
