Writing completely revolutionized humanity in almost every way. We can tweet, write scripts, and … well that’s really it, right? Language makes it so everything we do, works, right? Without language, I couldn’t talk to you or tell you to watch out for that predator!
To put it simply, language allows me to express what’s in here [head] out here. And that’s hugely powerful, it’s life-changing. It’s WORLD changing.
According to modern archeology, there may have been proto-language as far back as homo erectus and homo habilis more than a million years ago, but our first true verbal language probably developed between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago.
So if verbal language lets me tell someone next to me what’s inside my head, writing lets me tell someone 500 miles away, or 500 years from now. Writing was a major world-changing invention.
First with symbols, cave paintings and pictograms, a new study from a Canadian researcher believes this proto-written language may be 40,000 years old. The researcher looked at cave symbols across Southern Europe and found symbols repeated, indicating to her there was likely some kind of writing system in use.
There were even memes, where some symbols rose and fell in popularity, indicating an overarching interest and culture. But what they meant is a mystery, because there’s no context. Most archaeologists believe the first true writing was cuneiform.
It was developed in ancient Sumer around 3000 BCE, as an evolution of tiny pictograms, it eventually had enough contextual information to closely mimic what people were actually saying! It was created by pressing a blunt reed into a piece of clay allowing it to be preserved for later perusal.
Modern humans with their reading, writing, and… well pretty much that’s what they had at the time — were able to spread throughout Europe and Africa. But language does more than facilitate expression, storytelling and coordination…
When you write, your brain has to navigate those fine motor movements; recall letters, words, shapes, and rules; not to mention simply seeing what’s on the paper, reading and comprehending what you’ve written — AND predicting what you’re going to write next.
Functional MRI scans done on the brains of writers during a study from the University of Greifswald found brain activity similar to that of a professional sports star.
Using a custom-built writing desk, the researchers allowed people to write creatively while assessing their brain’s blood flow, and found visual and speech centers lit up during brainstorming, the hippocampus activated during factual recollection, and the prefrontal cortex was active, possibly to keep the storylines, characters and details straight while committing it to paper.
Our brains light up all OVER during the act of writing; and over time, with practice, parts of the brain learn to automate some of those processes. We don’t have to practice making an A after a while we just know how to do it automatically.
Our BRAINS have been altered, for the better — one could argue — by writing! Communicating with each other completely changed human history, allowing us to expand across the globe and share our best ideas. According to Gallup polling, we read more now than in the last 70 years (thanks internet!)!
And as emojis and gifs invade our written communication, writing is still evolving… A study in Emotional Neuroscience found our brains process emoji’s tiny little faces as actual faces.
So, is the future of writing the past of writing? Are we going back to pictograms? Do you hand-write ANYTHING anymore? I try to, but it’s really tough for my pen and paper to keep up with my brain…
