A boon for scribes and scholars

Research has shown the benefits of reading and making handwritten notes

As regular readers are aware, I love books. And when I started writing professionally I did so in long hand first, before editing on a laptop. Although I now write straight to screen and reluctantly read books on devices when on holidays, deep down I remain an old-fashioned paper and pen person.

So two recent pieces of research caught my eye: One looked at the benefits of regular reading and the other examined the benefits of writing long-hand.

Even though the sales of books are not dropping to any appreciable degree, the number of people who read for fun appears to be heading south.

According to research by The Reading Agency in the UK, only half of adults read regularly, a decline from 58 per cent in 2015. Among young people aged 16-24, a quarter have never been regular readers, and 44 per cent of this group are now considered ‘lapsed readers’.

So what, you might say. Young people are active on social media and watch videos. But do regular readers have a different kind of brain structure? A new study published in the journal NeuroImage suggests they do.

An analysis of open-source data from more than 1,000 participants found that readers of varying abilities had distinct traits in brain anatomy. The structure of two regions in the left hemisphere, which are crucial for language, were different in people who were good at reading.

One was the anterior part of the temporal lobe which helps associate and categorise different types of meaningful information. The other was Heschl’s gyrus, a fold on the upper temporal lobe, which hosts the auditory cortex.

Participants with better reading ability were found to have a larger anterior part of the temporal lobe in the left hemisphere compared to the right. Intuitively, it makes sense that having a larger brain area dedicated to meaning makes it easier to understand words and to read. But why would the auditory cortex be related to reading, which is predominantly a visual skill?

In order to pair letters with speech sounds, we first need to be aware of the sounds of the language (ie, phonological awareness). Phonology is a highly complex skill, where different sound and motor features are integrated into speech sounds. It appears to correlate with a thicker cortex in an area near the left Heschl’s gyrus.

Therefore, brain structure can tell us a lot about reading skills. And if you want to keep your Heschl’s gyrus thick and healthy, a regular reading habit is key.

Like many of us,
I spend less and less time writing by hand

Meanwhile, I was fascinated to hear the writer Colm Toibín describe how when fleeing his LA home amid the raging fires, the most important items he brought with him were his collection of notebooks, which contained handwritten drafts of his latest novel.

Like many of us, I spend less and less time writing by hand. And while this may not matter much to an ‘old fogie’ like me, might it have a negative effect on the development of children today?

What does the latest research say about the cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper? In children, studies have shown that writing out ABCs, as opposed to typing, leads to better and longer lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words. Some research has reported that  students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.

“There’s actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand,”  Prof Ramesh Balasubramaniam, a neuroscientist at the University of California, US, told National Public Radio last year. “It has important cognitive benefits.”

A high-density EEG study of university students, published in 2024, suggested that the intricate and precisely controlled nature of handwriting movements had a beneficial impact on the brain’s connectivity patterns related to learning and remembering. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, did not find evidence of such positive activation patterns when using a keyboard.

While I can’t see us handwriting emails, it seems we should make the most of any opportunity to read books and make handwritten notes. As a confirmed bibliophile and longhand scribe, I couldn’t agree more.