Ever try to read your physician’s prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don’t know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren can’t read the notes they send. Our new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury can’t (or won’t) write his own name on the new money being printed.

When we adults went to school, one of the first things we learned was how to write the alphabet, in caps and lower case, and then to hand-write words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Some of us were lucky enough to have penmanship class where we learned how to make our writing pretty and readable. Today, keyboarding is in, the Common Core Standards no longer require elementary students to learn cursive, and some schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, dismissing it as an “ancient skill.”[1]

The primary schools that teach handwriting spend only just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser Inc., one of the nation's largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Cursive is not generally taught after the third grade (my penmanship class was in the 7^thgrade; maybe its just coincidence, but the 7^th grade was when I was magically transformed from a poor student into an exceptional student).

Yet scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn “functional specialization,”[2]that is capacity for optimal efficiency. In the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.

There is spill-over benefit for thinking skills used in reading and writing. To write legible cursive, fine motor control is needed over the fingers. Students have to pay attention and think about what and how they are doing. They have to practice. Brain imaging studies show that cursive activates areas of the brain that are not affected by keyboarding.

Much of the benefit of cursive writing comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of hand- printing letters. During one study at Indiana University to be published this year,[3]researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and "adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters. The brain’s “reading circuit” of linked regions that are activated during reading was activated during cursive writing, but not during typing. This lab has also demonstrated that writing letters in meaningful context, as opposed to just writing them as drawing objects, produced much more robust activation of many areas in both hemispheres.

In learning to write by hand, even if it is just printing, a child’s brain must:

•            Locate each stroke relative to other strokes.
•            Learn and remember appropriate size, slant of global form, and feature detail characteristic of each letter.
•       Develop categorization skills.

Cursive writing, compared to printing, is even more beneficial because the movement tasks are more demanding, the letters are less stereotypical, and the visual recognition requirements create a broader repertoire of letter representation. Cursive is also faster and more likely to engage students by providing a better sense of personal style and ownership.

Other research highlights the hand's unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor at the University of Washington, reported her study of children in grades two, four and six that revealed they wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.[4]

There is a whole field of research known as “haptics,” which includes the interactions of touch, hand movements, and brain function.[5]Cursive writing helps train the brain to integrate visual, and tactile information, and fine motor dexterity. School systems, driven by ill-informed ideologues and federal mandate, are becoming obsessed with testing knowledge at the expense of training kids to develop better capacity for acquiring knowledge.

The benefits to brain development are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument. Not everybody can afford music lessons, but everybody has access to pencil and paper. Not everybody can afford a computer for their kids−maybe such kids are not as deprived as we would think.

Take heart. Some schools just celebrated National Handwriting Day on Jan. 23. Cursive is not dead yet. Parents need to insist that cursive be maintained in their local school.

Readers who want an easy way to acquire a neuroscience background will want to know about the 2nd Edition of my e-book, “Core Ideas in Neuroscience.” Check my web site for available formats and sources (thankyoubrain.com/neurobook). Also check out the Neuro-education discussion group I just created on Linkedin (type “Neuro-education" in Linkedin’s search field).

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[1] Slape, L. “Cursive Giving Way to Other Pursuits as Educators Debate Its Value.” The Daily News, Feb. 4,

2012. http://tdn.com/news/local/cursive-giving-way-to-other-pursuits-as-educators-debate-its/article_c0302938-4f94-11e1-af3a-0019bb2963f4.html

[2] James, Karin H. an Atwood, Thea P. (2009).The role of sensorimotor learning in the perception of letter-like forms: Tracking the causes of neural specialization for letters. Cognitive Neuropsychology.26 (1), 91-100.

[3] James, K.H. and Engelhardt, L. (2013). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain

development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education. Article in press.

[4] Berninger, V. “Evidence-Based, Developmentally Appropriate Writing Skills K–5: Teaching the

Orthographic Loop of Working Memory to Write Letters So Developing Writers Can Spell Words

and Express Ideas.” Presented at Handwriting in the 21st Century?: An Educational Summit,

Washington, D.C., January 23, 2012.

[5]Mangen, A., and Velay, J. –L. (2010). Digitizing literacy: reflections on the haptics of writing. In Advances in Haptics, edited by M. H. Zadeh. http://www.intechopen.com/books/advances-in-haptics/digitizing-literacy-reflections-on-the-haptics-of-writing

Snore a lot? Get up frequently at night to urinate? Wake up at 2 A.M. with bright ideas or worries? All these disruptions of sleep are common and more so as we get older. Does it matter? Well, of course such awakenings disrupt our sleep, and maybe it is just inconvenient. But disrupted sleep not only is more likely with age, it may promote deterioration in mental functioning. A recent study compared the effects of sleeping behavior in young adults and seniors. The study involved assessing the memory after sleeping of 18 young adults in their 20s and 15 older adults in their 70s. The subjects were tested on 120 word sets before they went to bed, and an EEG machine monitored their brain activity while they slept. Upon awakening, they were tested once again on the word pairs, but this time they took the tests while undergoing functional  magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.

The quality of deep sleep among the older adults was 75 percent lower than the younger ones, and their memory was significantly worse the next day−55 percent worse. The scans suggested deterioration of the frontal lobe. Shrunken brains can occur from aging and shrunken brains impair thinking and memory. But is it possible we have the cause and the effect backwards. Maybe what happens in the environment, such as impaired sleeping, causes both the shrunken brain and the impaired memory. Or in other words, what causes older brains to shrink?

Scientists consider a decrease of about 2% shrinkage every 10 years as normal. That may not be normal, just what most people experience because they are not taking care of their brains. There is abundant research that shows that exercises for both the brain and body help to reduce brain atrophy.

Of course, anything that damages neurons can reduce the number of their tree-like processes and the density of their contact points with other neurons. The list of such causes is long, including: alcohol abuse, brain inflammation, certain infections, concussion, impaired blood supply, lack of intellectual stimulus, vitamin B12 deficiency. It now appears that we should add fragmented sleep to the list.

Common natural causes of fragmented sleep in older humans are alcohol abuse and sleep apnea. Also, in males, enlarged prostate causes a need for frequent urination. As I have explained in my learning and memory blog posts (thankyoubrain.blogspot.com), learning events during the day are consolidated into lasting form during the sleep at night of the same day. We don’t know exactly how sleep helps, but obviously, you have far fewer mental distractions during sleep — unless, of course you keep waking up.

Alzheimer’s Disease also causes fragmented sleep. So, it is no surprise that the brain degeneration by the disease would cause memory problems. But maybe, just maybe, it is the fragmented sleep that accelerates onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Now, this seemingly ridiculous possibility has to be taken seriously in light of new research showing that sleep-disordered breathing, as in sleep apnea, seems to increase the risk of mental decline and even dementia in older women.

Disrupted sleep may also accelerate normal aging. This is certainly true when the cause is sleep apnea, which raises blood pressure and increases the cardiovascular damage that high blood pressure causes. Blood clotting is promoted, increasing the likelihood of strokes. Obesity and diabetes are often associated with sleep apnea, and it seems that sleep apnea not only results from obesity but can promote obesity and the diabetes that often accompanies obesity. Diabetes is toxic for nerve terminals. Similar neuropathy may also be occurring in their brain. Sleep apnea causes daytime sleepiness, and that it turn reduces attentiveness and mental activity, which when sustained over many years reduces the mental stimulus and promotes atrophy of neuronal processes.

Obviously, blood oxygen drops during sleep apnea. Normally, blood is 94% to 98% saturated with oxygen. But not breathing for 30 seconds or more during sleep causes oxygen level to drop to 80% or less. Any level below 90% oxygen level is dangerous, especially to the brain which demands nearly 20% of all the body’s oxygen supply. The adult brain can only survive about four minutes once oxygen is completely cut off.

So it is entirely possible that the slipping memory we see in so many elderly is a warning sign of something much more serious. But by the time the memory deficits show up, much of the damage has already been done. Prevention is the best hope.

Source:

Mander, B. A., Rao, V.,  Brandon, B. L., Saletin, J. M.,  et al. (2013). Prefrontal atrophy, disrupted NREM slow waves and impaired hippocampal-dependent memory in aging. Nature Neuroscience  doi:10.1038/nn.3324 

http://www.livestrong.com/article/161959-what-are-the-causes-of-brain-atrophy/

Yaffe, K., Laffan, A. M., Harrison, S. L. et al. (2011). Sleep-disordered breathing, hyupoxia, and risk of mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older women. JAMA. 306(6), 613-619. doi:10.1001/jama.2011.1115

For those who want to learn more about the brain, Dr. Klemm has just released the second edition of his e-book, “Core Ideas in Neuroscience.” See http://thankyoubrain.com/neurobook/index.htm