Grocery lists live in an app, birthday cards became texts and class notes are typed on a laptop. For Gen Z, a generation that grew up with screens, writing with a pen is becoming rare. Brain researchers say that change is worth paying attention to.
In short
- Some teachers report that young adults now struggle with writing by hand, a skill humans have used for more than 5,000 years.
- A Norwegian brain study found that handwriting activates far more brain connectivity than typing.
- In the US, at least half of states now have laws requiring cursive instruction in schools.
A skill older than any empire
Writing goes back more than 5,000 years, to the cuneiform script of ancient Mesopotamia, as Britannica explains. For most of that history, writing meant using your hand. Today, a generation raised on keyboards and touchscreens is breaking that habit.
The Spanish tech site Xataka gathered teachers’ observations about this shift. Nedret Kiliçeri, a professor at Istanbul University, described students whose handwriting is hard to read, who mix up letters and who avoid long, complex sentences.
What happens in the brain when you write by hand
At the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Ruud Van der Weel and Audrey Van der Meer recorded the brain activity of 36 university students with a 256-electrode EEG net while they either wrote by hand with a digital pen or typed. Their study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, found that handwriting produced widespread, interconnected brain activity that typing did not, as PsyPost summarizes.
“Handwriting involves most of the brain, requiring the brain to communicate fast and efficiently between its active parts,” Van der Meer has explained. She has also told Sciencenorway that there is evidence students learn and remember better when they take lecture notes by hand. For schools, the researchers go further: “we propose a minimum of handwriting tuition for all children in the lower grades.”
It is the same idea behind why paper calendar fans seem to remember their plans better: the pen forces the brain to do more of the work.
America is bringing cursive back
When the Common Core standards put the focus on keyboarding, cursive slipped out of many classrooms. The pendulum is now swinging back. According to Zaner-Bloser, at least half of US states have laws requiring cursive instruction, a number that has nearly doubled in ten years. California passed its own cursive law in 2023 by a 79-0 vote.
Gen Z, meanwhile, keeps proving it can fall for old-school things, like a 1970s perfume it has suddenly fallen for.
The limit
There is no reliable national data measuring how much Gen Z has lost this skill, and some figures circulating online have no verifiable source. The brain studies also do not show that writing by hand makes anyone smarter. Van der Meer herself notes that typing can be more practical for long texts.
The bottom line
Nobody needs to give up their phone. But if you want to remember something, writing it down by hand, even a short list, may be the oldest memory trick there is.
