If you’re a regular reader of this and my other blogs, you already know I am a proponent of writing on paper, journalling, logbooking and mindmapping. NOT because I’m a boomer or luddite. I love my Macbook Air, iPhone and iPad. I have all the latest tech for sports and health monitoring (Fitbit, AI-enabled squash and table tennis sensors and robots, etc.) to accelerate Deliberate Practice.
A Norwegian neuroscience lab spent years proving something students accidentally discover every exam season: the tools that feel faster “in the moment” while studying often hinder their learning and particularly — RECALL.
The breakthrough study came out of a research lab in Trondheim and was published in 2024 in Frontiers in Psychology. The results were so clear they should have forced every student, teacher, and parent to rethink how learning actually works.
The experiment itself looked deceptively simple.
Researchers recruited 36 university students and fitted each participant with a cap containing 256 sensors designed to track brain activity in real time. One word at a time appeared on a screen. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand using a digital pen on a touchscreen. At other times they typed the exact same word on a keyboard.
Same student. Same word. Same five seconds.
But inside the brain, two completely different things were happening.
When students wrote by hand, huge areas of the brain activated together in a highly coordinated pattern. Memory centres, sensory systems, spatial processing, and information encoding networks all lit up simultaneously. The brain was fully engaged, building connections across multiple regions at once.
Typing produced almost the opposite effect.
The widespread communication between brain regions largely disappeared. Much of the cortex went quiet. The brain was still functioning, obviously, but it was operating in a far shallower mode.
That difference matters more than most students realise.
Getting better grades is not really about spending more hours “studying.” It’s about creating stronger neural pathways so information sticks the first time, for recall later, WHEN IT MATTERS. Students who understand this stop obsessing over how long they study and start focusing on how deeply their brain processes information while they study.
Handwriting forces depth with LESS COGNITIVE FRICTION.
Typing encourages speed with LESS COGNITIVE FRICTION.
The reason comes down to something most people never notice. Writing by hand is neurologically demanding. Every letter requires thousands of tiny coordinated movements involving the fingers, wrist, eyes, visual system, spatial awareness, and motor cortex. Your brain has to constantly solve small movement problems while simultaneously processing meaning.
Each letter is physically different. Each word becomes a miniature construction project for the brain.
Typing removes almost all of that complexity. Pressing “A” requires essentially the same movement pattern as pressing “B” or “K.” The brain has far less work to do, which means it also has fewer opportunities to build durable memory connections.
This is why students who type pages of notes often remember surprisingly little afterward. The fingers were busy, but the brain was mostly on autopilot.
And this is where most high-achieving students unknowingly sabotage themselves.
They confuse information capture with learning.
A decade before the Norwegian research, Princeton researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested this exact problem in university lecture environments. Students were divided into two groups. One took notes on laptops with the internet disabled. The other took notes by hand.
The laptop students captured far more words.
But the handwriting students consistently performed better on questions that required actual understanding.
Why?
Because the laptop users could type almost fast enough to become court reporters. They copied lectures nearly word for word without deeply processing the material. Their notes looked impressive, but their brains skipped the hard part: deciding what mattered.
The handwriting students physically could not keep up with every sentence. They were forced to listen carefully, filter information, prioritise key concepts, and rewrite ideas in their own words.
That filtering process was the learning. The struggle improved the memory.
This is one of the most important lessons for students trying to get better grades with less effort: desirable difficulty beats effortless documentation almost every time.
Easy feels productive, but deep processing produces results.
This is also why students can spend hours highlighting textbooks, rereading notes, or watching endless study videos and still blank out during exams. Passive review creates familiarity, not mastery. Your brain starts recognising information without truly owning it.
Handwriting slows the process down just enough to force genuine thinking. And genuine thinking is what creates recall under pressure.
If you want higher grades without doubling your study hours, stop trying to study faster and start trying to study deeper.
- Write summary notes by hand after each class.
- Rewrite difficult concepts in your own words.
- Create handwritten mind maps instead of endless digital folders.
- Use paper flashcards for subjects requiring heavy memorisation.
- Take rough handwritten notes first, then organise them digitally later if needed.
The extra friction is not inefficiency, it’s the mechanism that makes the learning stick.
Students often believe top performers succeed because they work harder for longer. In reality, many elite students simply use methods that force stronger encoding the first time around. They spend less time relearning forgotten material because their initial study process created deeper neural connections.
Your memory is probably not broken. Your study system might be.
Pick up a pen and start writing by hand…
You might just amaze yourself!
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