Where Mueller and Oppenheimer documented the behavioural effect of handwriting, van der Meer’s lab documented the neural substrate. High-density EEG recordings during handwriting show activation across visual, motor, and sensory integration regions that simply does not appear during typing.
The practical implication: handwriting recruits more of the brain, and the more regions that engage during encoding, the more retrieval routes exist later. Memory is a graph, and handwriting builds a richer one.
This work is why Fluera’s engine was written from scratch. A canvas that drops strokes, lags under pressure, or flattens tilt data is a canvas that throws away exactly the signal van der Meer’s EEG work shows matters most. Engineering effort on latency and fidelity is not polish — it is the product.