Abraham Flanigan and colleagues settled the argument in 2024, pooling 24 studies of roughly 3,000 college students. Typing wins on volume: typed notes hold far more words. Handwriting wins on achievement, by a small but reliable margin — Hedges’ g = 0.248 (p < 0.001). And reviewing the notes before the test made that advantage larger, not smaller.
The hand is slower, and the plainest reading of the gap is still the best one: slowness forces selection, selection is processing, processing is encoding. It is not that handwriting is better input than typing — it is that the bottleneck of the hand protects the mind from shallow transcription.
Audrey van der Meer’s high-density EEG work shows what differs in the brain: handwriting produces broader, more connected activation across visual, motor and sensory regions than typing does. That is a neural correlate, not a measure of how much is learned or remembered. The advantage itself is collected later, on the day you come back to the page — and that is the day Fluera’s engine was built for.