"If you want to remember something, don't type it, write it!"

The novelist, James A. Michener, once said, "If you type adeptly with 10 fingers, you're typing faster than your mind is working."  He may have been more correct than he could have possibly imagined.  It seems like writing by hand is a lost practice.  No one writes out letters anymore.  Short messages or reminders have turned into texts or Tweets.  The handwritten prescription or medical record is almost a thing of the past.  Cursive handwriting is no longer taught in school, and penmanship grades, the bane of my childhood elementary school years, have long since faded from memory.  No matter where you turn, it seems as if handwriting is a vestige of a bygone age. 


What, if any, is the impact of this shift from handwriting to typing (analog to digital, if you will)?  Funny you should ask.  As it turns out, there are a number of studies that strongly suggest that things that are written out by hand are better remembered compared to things that are typed.  More and more schools (even in elementary school) are providing laptops or tablet computers for their students - taking notes on a tablet computer is much quicker than say, writing out the notes by hand.  However, it appears that students who write out notes by hand during class will learn the material and commit it to memory better than those students who type out their notes into a computer (see "Students, put your laptops away!" for more information). 


If you work in the health care industry, you probably use an electronic medical record.  The purported benefits of the electronic medical record are numerous - the reality is that most physicians and health care providers over the age of 50 years would rather go back to paper charts (I actually don't know if that statistic is true or not, it just feels like it is the case based on my own anecdotal experience!).  I wonder - and I have not seen a study on this question - if medical students, residents, fellows, and physicians would remember their patients' medical histories better if they wrote out the history by hand as opposed to typing it into a computer?  There are probably too many variables that play into this (for one, patients are often handed off from one physician to another multiple times during their stay), but it is a very interesting question.  I will leave the answer for someone else to figure out.


There seems to be something about handwriting that helps move information from our working memory to our long-term memory.  Perhaps Mr. Michener was right - it may be that when we type, our brains just can't keep up.  For now, if you really want to remember something, don't type it - write it!