Writing and drawing on whiteboard walls has many beneficial effects on the brain. These impacts can be leveraged in the business office, the classroom, the home, and other settings. Studies have shown that writing by hand has a number of positive effects on both cognitive and physical health. These effects are amplified when you do the writing on a large, easy-to-use vertical surface like a whiteboard wall. The following article offers suggestions on using whiteboard walls to obtain the most significant advantages for you and your colleagues or students’ mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
Enhanced Memory Retention
Writing is a highly practical tool for boosting our cognitive faculties. Many studies have shown links between writing and mental abilities such as memory, critical thinking, and creativity. Writing and drawing on whiteboard walls are beneficial for activating and improving our visual and motor memory. They enhance the recall and understanding of complex concepts. Memory retention is the ability to store and remember information or experiences over time. It’s the process of recovering data after it’s been programmed and stored in our brains.
However, memory retention may decline sooner or later, a process known as forgetting. Research shows that people can retain the knowledge gained through formal and informal education for long periods, with an initial phase of forgetting followed by lasting retention.
The following are some ways you can positively impact lasting memory retention:
Doing motivational activities
Establishing a goal-setting scheme
Practicing personalized learning methods
Employing creative teaching techniques
Making effective use of educational resources
Exploiting constructive learning tools.
To help in using these tactics, whiteboard walls can be your go-to communication resource in the office, school, or home setting. They’re highly useful for creating activities to motivate office staff, household members, and students. They’re also perfect tools for setting goals and doing personalized learning, which is especially beneficial for homeschoolers.
Improved Creativity with Whiteboard Walls
The expansive, readily erasable vertical surfaces of whiteboard walls encourage non-stop, free-form thinking and rapid brainstorming. These, in turn, lead you and your students or team members to come up with more novel ideas and solutions than would be possible through typing on a computer or laptop.
It’s typical for office team members, learners, and others to work solely on horizontal surfaces like desks or tables all day. However, this practice normally involves sitting for long periods with minimal arm, hand, and upper-body movement. As such, it can be detrimental to developing fine motor and cognitive skills in children and to maintaining these skills in adults.
On the other hand, writing and drawing on large vertical surfaces like whiteboard walls require continuous broad movements of the torso and arms. These actions boost strength and flexibility in the joints and muscles of the trunk and upper extremities. They also stimulate blood flow to the brain, thus enhancing creative ideation and overall cognitive capacity.
Moreover, adding a bit of aesthetic appeal can give people that extra boost in engagement and creativity that teachers and managers seek. When you offer students or team members the creative possibility of using colored markers and erasing them immediately, they can use their own style and have fun with their work assignments. Employing whiteboard walls in the classroom and business office leads to increased creativity in both students and staff members. This is so because the walls offer a modifiable visual platform where people may connect their individual thoughts, images, and presentation styles to the structured concepts taught in class or dealt with in company projects.
Improved User Engagement and Collaboration
Whiteboard walls also facilitate group interaction and discussion, thus promoting better teamwork, collective problem-solving, and enhanced cognitive ability. When groups of team members or students work collaboratively on whiteboard walls, the joint effort stimulates their brains. This stimulation, in turn, enhances their memories and ability to understand large amounts of information at one time.
Physical aging is accompanied by a host of changes in a person’s cognitive faculties, ultimately affecting learning and memory retention. However, by reversing some of these typical age-related developments, learning collaboratively may benefit adults of various age levels. Using whiteboard walls is an ideal way to gain and exchange information in group settings. Whiteboard walls’ open-ended, inviting surfaces inspire users to record streams of ideas and images freely. This consequently triggers the brain to think more clearly and creatively in any subject area, from math to music to marketing.
Reduced Stress With Whiteboard Walls
Writing or drawing on whiteboard walls can also have a calming, centering effect on the brain. This reduces stress and promotes clearer thinking and a more tranquil classroom, home, or office environment. For creative writers, for those who write content for websites, and for others, the relaxing effect of using whiteboard walls can also improve the quality of their output. This occurs because writing by hand makes people more reflective and careful about word choice, sentence structure, and spelling than they would be if typing on a computer or laptop.
Moreover, unlike these digital devices, whiteboard walls are uncomplicated single-purpose tools. As such, they can help you focus solely on writing and avoid distractions like the urge to surf the web or send emails. This situation can also reduce stress as you’re less prone to feel guilty about avoiding work and engaging in unnecessary activities that your boss might notice in due time.
Enhanced Problem-Solving Skills
Visually mapping out problems on whiteboard walls helps break down complex subject matter, making it easier for you and others to develop solutions and strategies. In addition to designing structured maps or diagrams to enhance problem-solving, informal, open-ended doodling and drawing on whiteboard walls also develop problem-solving skills. Since doodling and drawing dynamically engage the brain, they are ideal for bringing embryonic solutions up to the surface to be considered by a group.
Problem-solving through doodling or drawing on the vast vertical surface of a whiteboard wall makes thoughts visible to everyone in the office or classroom. So, using a whiteboard wall instead of a table or desk for these tasks avoids blocking new insights from others’ views. Instead, it shares them openly with the group so that problem-solving becomes more collaborative and thus more manageable.
On a related note, a recent study showed that students’ neural activity was greatly stimulated when they wrote words by hand as opposed to studying texts visually. This close connection between handwriting and increased brain activity demonstrates that problem-solving is much more straightforward when the hands explore solutions and externalize new options.
Better Organization and Planning
Using whiteboard walls to generate to-do lists, work schedules, and project timelines improves both personal and group organization and time management. This, in turn, leads to clearer thinking, enhanced cognitive facility, and more efficient workflow in the office, home, or classroom. Creating lists can also help decrease stress and anxiety, feel less overwhelmed, and be more in control of daily affairs.
Encouragement of Physical Activity
Engaging in physical activity, such as standing and moving around while utilizing whiteboard walls, has been shown to have numerous positive effects on the body and mind. This includes enhancing blood circulation, increasing heart rate, boosting energy levels, and improving overall health. Additionally, the act of handwriting has been found to stimulate more complex connections within the brain compared to typing, making it especially advantageous for cognitive functions, learning, and memory retention.
A recent study from Norway using EEGs showed that when the research subjects engaged in the physical act of writing by hand, their brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when they typed on a keyboard. Such extensive brain connectivity is known to be vital for enhancing memory retention and for encoding new information. Thus, writing by hand is highly beneficial for learning at all age levels, especially when done on the vast vertical surfaces of whiteboard walls.
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