书写让你更聪明

Handwriting has become a dying art, now that kids start using keyboards as soon as they begin school. But writing things out by hand may be a critical way we train our brains, several studies suggest.

书写成为日渐消亡的一门艺术，现在的小孩一上学就开始使用键盘。但是很多研究表明，用手书写可能是我们训练大脑的一个重要途径。

Writing by hand is different from typing because it requires using strokes to create a letter, rather than just selecting the whole letter by touching a key, says Virginia Berninger a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. These finger movements activate large regions of the brain involved in thinking, memory, and language.

用手书写不同于打字，因为它要求我们用笔锋去创造每一个字母，而不是通过按键在所有的字母中选择，而书写这一动作则使思考、记忆和语言所涉及的大部分大脑区域激活起来，来自华盛顿大学的心理学教授Virginia Berninger如是说。

Handwriting helps children learn letters and shapes, improves their composition of ideas, and may also boost fine-motor skills development.

书写帮助孩子们认识字母、图形，提高了他们谱写各种想法的能力，而且可能使他们精细运动的能力得到迅速提高。

A study by Berninger found that in grades two, four, and six, children wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand than when typing on a keyboard.

Berninger的一项研究发现，在2、4、6年级中，孩子们在写散文时使用手写会比通过键盘更快速地写更多的字，表达更多的想法。

A separate study by researchers at Indiana University found that children who practiced printing by hand had more active brains than kids who simply looked at letters.

在印第安纳大学的另一项研究中发现，那些进行抄写的孩子比单纯看书的孩子拥有更活跃的大脑。

It’s not just children who benefit from writing things out by hand, says a study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Adults learning a new language remember its characters better if they write them out by hand than if they produce them with a keyboard.

CognitiveNeuroscience杂志的一项研究表明，不仅仅是孩子们在手写方面受益。成年人在学习一门新的语言的过程中，通过书写要比运用键盘更好地记住单词。

As more people spend their days on the computer, says neuroscientist P. Murali Doraiswamy of Duke University, “retraining people in handwriting skills could be a useful cognitive exercise.”

由于当下越来越多的人整日与电脑为伍，来自杜克大学的神经学家P. Murali Doraiswamy提出，书写技能的再培训可能成为一个有用的认知活动。