Your Handwriting May Offer Clues About Brain Health

You Should Know: There are a lot of theories out there about what you can tell about a person from their handwriting. Does messy handwriting mean you’re creative? Do big letters mean you’re outgoing? While there’s not much science behind using handwriting to judge personality traits, research suggests it may hold some clues about our cognitive health. 

Going Deeper: In one recent study, healthy and cognitively impaired residents in assisted-living facilities completed several writing tasks, which were analyzed for speed, smoothness, stroke count, and other characteristics. When transcribing new information, participants who used more pen strokes, were slower to write a sentence after hearing it aloud, or wrote letters larger vertically showed greater signs of cognitive decline. 

Takeaway: Writing by hand is a complicated process — it requires a combination of hand-eye-brain coordination, incorporating dexterity, fine motor skills, thinking, and memory all at the same time. These findings were less about handwriting style, and more so focused on what it revealed about how efficiently the brain processed information and translated it into movement on the page. 

Bottom Line: This was a small study, and more research is needed, but it suggests our handwriting mechanics may offer insight into our cognitive health — and could one day become a simple way to identify cognitive changes earlier.