[NTLK] HWR and the Art of Thinking

[Lord Groundhog]

~~~ On 2011/04/01 00:23, Lloyd Conway at ssgconway at juno.com wrote ~~~

>     What attracted me to the story was the intuitive sense it made to me.  I
> was a prolific writer with Bic 1.0, but I have always found typing to be
> laborious, at best.  I never have the feeling of putting thoughts down
> naturally with a keyboard as I do with a pen or stylus.  (I used to own
> fountain pens, BTW, but haven't had one in several years.) It's just more
> natural, and I suspect that has something to do with the brain stimulation
> credited to the act of writing.
>       At any event, I thought that this audience would find the piece to
> be...stimulating.
> Regards,
> -Lloyd Conway
>   Charlotte, Michigan
> 
> ... There's also a lot of research that positively links the development
> of motor skills and cognitive ability.  See
> http://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2010/06/psychology-of-handwriting.html
> 
> But sadly educators are thinking that handwriting is being replaced by
> keyboards and so they are forecasting a day when they will no longer teach it.
> Of course that just accelerates the trend.  And the children are robbed.
> ...
> ButRe:RE: HWR and the Art of Thinking we Newton users know that is so much
> more than that."
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Tony Kan


It certainly was stimulating, Lloyd, so thanks for it.  (Though no doubt it
would've been even more so for me, if I'd written it out in long-hand rather
than just reading it. ;-) )

I didn't mean to denigrate the idea, only to lament the lack of
documentation.  As cognitive research progresses it's becoming more evident
how the brain/mind interface on the cellular level, and it seems more likely
that through repetition concepts are encoded onto small associataions of
neurons.  If that can be verified, there is the expectation that the
discreet patterns of movement that make up each printed or written letter to
form words and sentences is creating such neuronal associations but also is
triggering the recognition of other associations that could be related.  And
since I like documentation, I'd better add that I'm referring to work on
this which I read in _Nature_ some years back.  I read the article around
the same time I acquired my first Newt, so we're talking the summer of 2005.



Relating to this, I'm old enough to remember when it was standard wisdom
among all my teachers that "if you hear it, you remember a little; if you
see it, you remember some; if you write it down, you remember more; if you
use it, you remember the most".  And they put it into practice with all that
writing we had to do for homework.  But try and tell kids that nowadays ...

And I'll stop there before I really sound like an old fogey!


 
Shalom. 
Christian 

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

³Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a Newton.²
            -- ref.:  Arthur C. Clarke

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1ZzpdPJ7Zr4
(With thanks to Chod Lang)
http://tinyurl.com/29y2dl
http://www.diyplanner.com/node/3942


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