It might be time to get the pens and notebooks back out and shut off the keyboard for a while. Just pretend you’re back in the first grade and don’t have a minicomputer in your back pocket.

Writing by hand can help stimulate the whole brain and stave off cognitive decline, according to a study by Van der Weel and Van der Meer (2024), as reported by Pamela B. Rutledge in Psychology Today. Using a more personal note, she writes,

I’ve never been one to keep a journal, but I now wonder if the exclusive use of computers and the lack of handwriting practice is doing my brain a disservice by decreasing the activity of cortico-subcortical components of the writing network (Longcamp et al., 2016). My reliance on computers has certainly not done any favors for the legibility of my handwriting.

Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Your Brain | Psychology Today

Rutledge doesn’t allude to AI in the article, but her warnings about the seductive ease of the keyboard naturally make one wonder about ChatGPT. If typing quickly on a keyboard is making us lose some of the slowness, depth, and focus needed to write and think well, then large language models like ChatGPT open the door to cognitive decline even wider. Writing on the page with a pen or pencil doesn’t allow us to backspace as easily, or write 100 words in one minute, and even threatens our perfectionism; without the ability to delete whole pages in an instant, I have to accept what I’ve written and be willing to edit it later. ChatGPT requires little more than a prompt and lets the “writer” sit back as the bot spins its magic.

Even though I’m typing this up, I’ve also recognized the need to return to “the basics.” Screentime can induce a kind of freneticism in writers that makes haste seem more imperative than quality. But, according to this study, even those who don’t write for a living should be encouraged to take up a quill and scribble down some jottings. Who knows? Maybe whole books would result.