Lawrence Barsalou (1999), Margaret Wilson (2002), and Susan Goldin-Meadow (2003) built the modern case: cognition is embodied. People who gesture while problem-solving perform better. Abstract concepts are grounded in sensory-motor experience. The hand is not a peripheral to the brain — it is part of the system.
For learning, this has hard consequences. Typing activates a narrow, highly practised motor pattern. Handwriting activates a rich, variable motor pattern with integrated visual, spatial, and proprioceptive feedback. Van der Meer’s EEG recordings (2020) show the difference concretely: handwriting engages broad brain networks that typing does not.
Fluera’s insistence on the pen — thirteen brush engines, pressure and tilt tracking, sub-15-millisecond stroke latency — is the embodied-cognition thesis taken seriously. The hand stays in the loop because the hand is part of the thinking.