Prema Jayakumar

I don’t know how to do a number of things that my mother and grandmother were efficient at. Besides being able to identify a number leaves and flowers, they also knew their names and properties. The latter perhaps could be made good by studying texts, but what about the skill sets that are getting lost every day? It is not just languages that die when people who use it die or stop using it, but also skills that may seem to be of not much importance. The loss of skills are akin to the loss of things that make us human. Recipes have been lost, ways of doing things have been lost, perhaps because we have gone on to methods that are quicker and easier. No one says that the grinding stone and the pestle should be brought back, but the loss of at least some of the skills are to be mourned. Because, with the loss of each skill and the loss of each physical interaction with our natural surroundings, we are losing touch with the world around us. And now they say that it is not only to be mourned nostalgically, just as a loss, it might have consequences that are not too pleasant to human life itself.

All this introspection was prompted by reading about the horror expressed by a class of high school students in the United Kingdom who were asked to write by hand one sentence in a page of their answer papers. Their hand written answer was a testament to the fact they had used their hand to write something on their own. It was not part of the on line question paper or answer paper and had to be submitted separately. The students felt that they were being put upon as it was not a part of their examination. They only had to type the answers or highlight them or whatever and not have to put pen to paper.

However, neurological studies have found that writing is better than typing as far as retaining your cognitive skills into old age is concerned. That there is something about the physical nature of writing on paper, holding a pen or pencil, that stimulates nerve centres that otherwise do not get involved in the process of your writing job. And the calligraphy of people of a generation that is perhaps a few years older than mine is wonderful, not consciously artistic but artistic by the very nature of writing.

This is true not only of writing. We knead dough with a machine and then roll an exercise ball in our palms to make our fingers work better. We take a vehicle to a distance of one kilometre and then walk on the treadmill for half an hour to get exercise. And again, there are studies that suggest that walking on treadmills could affect your knees badly. Whereas, even if the air around is polluted, as the advertisements for treadmills suggest, it is surely better to risk it rather than risk damage to your knees! We walk in footwear even on clean surfaces and then walk on specially laid pebbles to give exercise to the nerve endings in our feet. We use cutlery to avoid touching the food that we eat, losing the flavour of some types of food at least. Surely each type of food should be eaten as it was meant to be eaten.

So, if the loss of these skills, of writing on paper, of using your fingers to shape, means also losing some of the functions of your brain, isn’t it time we woke up to the fact and perhaps started including a page of that school-time dread of copy-writing in our daily routine?

We have always known that doing something with your hands at times of anxiety lessens the stress. People knit or cook or embroider or walk in times of stress to feel calmer. Even that automatic pacing is probably that. We have always known that such activity helps calm us down. But with advances in non-invasive techniques to read what happens in the brain when limbs do certain actions, it now appears that complex actions of the hand (like writing) can impact on how we think and feel and even keep the brain healthier through old age.

So do pick up that notebook and a pen and write a daily list of things to do at least.