Thinking/Writing/Remembering
Y’all know I have had that perpetual question as to why we, as a society, have stopped really thinking about much of anything. In other words, how did we get so dumb when everything we need to be smart is right at our fingertips? I read something the other day that started me think thinking it is at least a partial explanation.
When I was in college, I learned about how people learn. One part of that is we learn with all of our senses—taste, touch, smell, hearing. And we learn with our entire body, not just the part above the neck; so movement helps us to learn, too. I was taught that if you can involve multiple senses and movement in a learning experience, the more actual learning and retention happens.
I believe this is true of thinking, too. The more you can involve your senses and your body in thinking, the better you can think. Poor Brain does not need to be left there in the dark, lonely skull doing all the work!
He works better as a part of the total body team. Do you ever find that drawing something or writing something out helps you to understand or work through a thought or a problem? Does your brain get overloaded sometimes, and going for a walk or a run helps you to get it back to operating smoothly? These illustrate the idea that involving the rest of the body can really help your thinking.
Back to what I read that sparked this—that children learn better when they are taught cursive writing and use it in school.
It does not seem to work as well to simply learn handwriting, as in block letters or printing, and it certainly is not effective to learn only to type letters on a keyboard. There is something about learning and using that flowing, connected script that just works better in the brain. There is a big debate as to the idea that cursive works better for dyslexic children. The proponents say that making the words out of connected letters makes them more recognizable as whole words and involves not only memorization of the order of letters, but muscle memory of the flow of writing a word. One detractor said she did not buy this idea since she still has problems reading cursive, but I feel certain she did not grow up with cursive the way we older people did. A joke going around is that cursive serves as a way that we more mature folks can write in a secret code that younger people will not be able to read!
Just to try this for myself, I wrote this column with a pencil in a notebook before transcribing it onto the computer. It was not only the physical act of writing, but also the feel and sound of the pencil on the paper, of erasing or scratching through changes and mistakes, and the real key is that I could remember every word I wrote without having to go back and read it. I think there is something to this idea of handwriting being connected to thinking and remembering. Maybe one of the reasons we seem not to be so smart any more is because we keep almost all our learning and thinking strictly above the neck!
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