According to Jordan Peterson, the answer is a definite no. And I agree. It’s not a Boomer opinion, its cognitive science that still applies to YOU/YOUR generation and even the next few generations because of evolutionary biology and sociological imprints.
This is not opinion, the science backs it up
For years, students have been told that the smartest way to study is to ‘do it’ faster.
- Faster typing.
- Faster note-taking.
- Faster highlighting.
- Faster access to information.
Schools pushed laptops into classrooms, universities shifted to tablets, and adult learners returning to study were promised that digital tools would make learning more efficient. But buried inside neuroscience labs and university research papers, a very different story has been unfolding, and almost nobody outside academia has been paying attention.
A Norwegian neuroscientist named Audrey van der Meer spent two decades studying what actually happens inside the brain when people write by hand compared to when they type. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and in 2024 her team published findings in Frontiers in Psychology that should make every student rethink how they study.
The experiment itself was surprisingly simple. Thirty-six university students sat wearing caps fitted with 256 sensors that measured electrical activity across the brain. One word at a time appeared on a screen. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand using a digital pen on a touchscreen. Other times they typed the exact same word on a keyboard. The researchers then examined how different regions of the brain communicated with each other during those few seconds of activity.
What they found was dramatic.
When students wrote by hand, the brain became highly connected. Regions involved in memory, sensory processing, movement, attention, and learning all activated together in a coordinated pattern across the cortex. The brain was fully engaged, almost as though multiple systems had joined forces to process and store the information.
But when the same students typed the same word, much of that activity disappeared. The deep communication between brain regions weakened substantially. Same student. Same word. Same amount of time. Completely different neurological event.
The reason comes down to something most people never think about. Handwriting is not one simple movement. Every letter forces the brain to solve a tiny physical puzzle. Your fingers, wrist, eyes, coordination, spatial awareness, and motor systems all work together in real time to create each unique shape. The letter “a” is physically different from “b.” “g” requires different movement patterns than “t.” The brain constantly adapts as it writes.
Typing removes almost all of that complexity. Every keypress becomes nearly identical. The finger motion barely changes whether you are typing an “m” or an “s.” The brain has far less work to do, which means it has far less reason to deeply encode the information.
Van der Meer warned that this matters even more for younger learners. Children who grow up primarily learning on tablets can struggle to distinguish letters like “b” and “d” because they have never physically experienced the movements required to produce those letters by hand. The body itself becomes part of how the brain learns.
Years before van der Meer’s research, two researchers at Princeton University, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion using a completely different approach. They studied 327 students across several experiments. One group took lecture notes on laptops with internet access disabled. The other took notes by hand. Afterwards, all students were tested on what they actually understood from the lectures.
The laptop users often captured more words overall, sometimes nearly transcribing the lecture word for word. But when the questions required genuine understanding rather than simple memorisation, the handwriting group consistently outperformed them.
The difference was hidden inside the notes themselves.
Students typing on laptops could record information quickly without mentally processing much of it. Their fingers became stenographers. But students writing by hand could not physically keep up with every sentence. They were forced to slow down, listen carefully, decide what mattered most, and translate ideas into their own words before writing them down.
That act of filtering and rephrasing became the learning process itself.
The keyboard made recording easier, but it quietly bypassed the deeper mental work that creates understanding.
This is particularly important for high school students trying to survive heavy workloads, university students drowning in lecture content, and mature-age learners returning to study after years away from formal education. Many assume they need more apps, more productivity systems, or better digital organisation. In reality, they may simply need more friction.
The brain does not always learn best when things are easiest. Often, it learns best when it has to work.
That extra effort of handwriting forces concentration. It slows thinking down just enough for comprehension to catch up. It creates stronger memory traces because the brain is engaging visually, physically, spatially, and conceptually all at once.
This does not mean students should throw away their laptops. Digital tools are incredibly useful for research, drafting assignments, collaboration, and organisation. But when it comes to learning difficult material, understanding concepts deeply, remembering information for exams, or building long-term mastery, the evidence keeps pointing back to one old-fashioned tool sitting quietly on a desk.
A pen.
Students who handwrite summaries after lectures often remember more. Students who sketch diagrams, mind maps, formulas, or concepts by hand frequently understand them faster. Mature learners returning to university often rediscover that writing notes physically helps them reconnect with focus and retention in ways typing never did.
The irony is that modern education has spent years trying to remove slowness from learning, while neuroscience keeps showing that some forms of slowness are exactly what make learning stick.
The slower road often becomes the faster one.
So the next time you sit in class, prepare for an exam, read a textbook chapter, or listen to a lecture, resist the temptation to simply capture everything digitally. Instead, force your brain to engage. Write the key ideas in your own words. Draw connections. Summarise concepts by hand. Make your brain solve the tiny physical and mental problems that handwriting creates.
Because learning is not about how much information passes through your fingers.
It is about how much of it changes your brain before it leaves the page.
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