The Neuromantics – S3, Ep 1

South Sudan gained its independence from the north in 2011. A matter of months later, the retired human-rights researcher Elizabeth Hodgkin went to teach in a village in the mountains of Eastern Equatoria, close to the Ugandan border. Letters from Isohe (2022) memorably evokes the challenges of life in this beautiful but remote community. Food supplies falter, girls are forced into marriage, teachers’ salaries disappear, people die: but the village schools survive. Hodgkin’s dispatches are responsive and informal; they bring us close, as only letters can, to the moment of witness. Perhaps that feeling of responsiveness has something to do with handwriting itself. In experiments designed to measure the “cognitive effort” of handwriting and typing, Sirine Bouriga and Thierry Olive (“Is typewriting more resources-demanding than handwriting in undergraduate students?”, 2021) made an interesting discovery: whereas students can stop and restart handwritten assignments with ease, they find it harder to be prised away from keyboards to perform other tasks. Typing seems to demand more effort; handwriting, once learnt, enters the realm of the semi-instinctive. Is that because writing is closer to the body – to gesture and depiction? Or does the “difficulty” of typing simply reflect the relative novelty of the QWERTY (or digital) keyboard, and the time it takes the brain to get used to disruptive technologies?