There’s an old British TV gameshow called “Bullseye”, hosted by craggy, long-faced comedian Jim Bowen, where after the contestants have failed to win the main prize - a caravan, a speedboat, a brand new luxury portable television with stereo sound - the prizes are then wheeled in, to illustrate “what they could have won”.
To be clear - this is beyond the point where they have any opportunity whatsoever of winning it. It’s designed purely to make those contestants feel the tragic enormity of how much they’ve fallen short on getting a prize actually worth having (the other prizes were, shall we say, ‘low-cost’, to stay within broadcasting regulations) - and to let everyone in the audience see it sink in on the faces of those contestants.
Of course, viewers thoroughly enjoyed it, and the show became somewhat (in)famous as a result.
I would never do that to you. Not ever.
HOWEVER!
Because you’re a free subscriber to my newsletter Everything Is Amazing, you’ve missed a bunch of stuff behind the paywall - some of the best things I’ve written for the newsletter, I reckon.
Here’s a bit of one of them, on the power of handwriting in a digital age:
“Putting aside the problems with their addictive nature and the tendencies for tech companies to do many, many problematic things in pursuit of a profit, surely the devices themselves are designed to be as intuitive as possible and therefore, logically speaking, they must be the quickest, most efficient and consequently most effective way to learn and remember anything?
Surely? I mean, wouldn’t that make perfect sense?
Recently, a team headed by Audrey Van der Meer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology decided to put this to the test.
They recruited 36 students in their early 20s - in other words, true digital natives at home with using tablets, smartphones and laptops - and attached electrodes to their heads to measure the electrical activity in their brains. Then they asked them to record the words they saw flashed on a screen in front of them - with half the group writing the words down using pen & paper, and the other half typing them out.
The authors of the study concluded:
“When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning.”
What I hadn’t considered until I read these findings (via New Scientist’s recent reporting on it) was our body’s role here.
In terms of what your hands are doing, there is a huge difference between typing a word and writing it. When you type, it’s much the same action happening - there is a bit of variation with what hand you use to hit which key, there’s a little pivoting of your arms or wrists as they move over the keyboard, but that’s about it. And tablets & smartphones? You can be hardly moving at all, frozen in place apart from a couple of your fingers doing all the work - and, perhaps more importantly, you’re using those fingers in the same way for each letter you type.
Most of us can type much faster than we can write because we’re moving our bodies much less. But it seems the cost of that is we’re shortcutting our body’s role in helping us think and remember what we’re typing. That’s what handwriting is: it’s the slower, more physically arduous and complex way, but that physical demand upon us seems to be serving a really useful cognitive purpose.
(I bet you know someone who thinks best when they’re on their feet. Here’s yet another example from Annie Murphy Paul’s newsletter.)
That is the suggestion here. It’s a small sample size - but it definitely tallies with other work done elsewhere, such as this study from the University of Tokyo in 2021 (which also found the participants using paper completed the test about 25% faster than those who used digital tablets or smartphones, because of the creative freedom that paper gave them).”
That full article is here:
If you wanted to read the whole of that piece, you could become a paid subscriber by clicking here - all subscriptions are currently discounted until October 1st - at which point you’d also get access to everything else behind the paywall.
Here’s a sample of what else you could have learned (but still can, if you’re kind enough to choose to upgrade):
A 5-part series on the way ancient geology affects our daily lives:
Mindbending ideas from speculative fiction, including dreamy robots, sexless worlds, a runaway train to the end of the universe, and more:
The strangeness of our fickle and unreliable memories, including how they’ve been proven to flat-out lie to us about our own past:
Lessons in how to keep going across the ‘chasm of Ugggh’, via two behavioural economists, one science writer and one ultrarunner:
The science of the tides, and of those strange places in our oceans where they don’t exist:
What’s going on in your brain when you can’t get a song out of your head?
Want to take a look at any of these? I’d love to welcome you on board to join EiA’s 800+ paid supporters who get everything the newsletter has to offer:
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Whatever your decision, thanks so much for reading.
- Mike
