Is typing dangerous to the quality of your thinking?

Recently, my friends have all started panicking about this. It began a month ago when the Atlantic reported on a study finding that college students who typed notes on a laptop remembered less about a lecture than those who wrote by hand. Old-fashioned handwriting, it seems, focused the mind. The students who handwrote were more judicious in their note-taking; the typists frantically tried to transcribe every single thing the lecturer said. “Does this mean I should stop typing things?” a friend asked me. “Am I getting stupider with every keystroke?”

Then the New York Times science section weighed in with a cover story arguing that, indeed, handwriting was cognitively superior to typing — particularly for young kids. The piece by Maria Konnikova cited several recent experiments, including one that found greater brain activity in children who wrote rather than typed. Another one discovered that elementary-school kids who hand-wrote their work produced more words — and more ideas — than those who typed. “Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information,” Konnikova concluded.

By now, my friends were all in a lather. Typing is turning us into idiots! they emailed me. I’m going to go out and buy some pencils!

This is the best pencil sharpener on the planet.

Now, I’m a full-blown pencil fetishist. (Actually, it’s even worse; I sit around obsessing about pencil sharpeners, too. Behold the video footage.) So I was actually quite grateful for this mini-panic over the dangers of the keyboard. Anything that gets people to use more graphite is fine by me!

But, as I told my friends, things aren’t quite so simple. If you look at the science around typing, it suggests that keyboards may not be so hazardous for your mind — because it all depends on what task you’re doing. When you’re taking notes, it’s true, handwriting can have an edge. It’s good for absorbing knowledge.

But when you’re trying to produce knowledge — to develop and express thoughts of your own? Then the winner is often typing.

More specifically, it’s fast typing.