How the Brain Thinks When Learning Is Hard

Twenty-five years ago, I first came face to face with a paradox I had no answer for. And I was already a professional, a speech therapist who prepared children for school. It happened with my own child.

She was clearly bright and intensely creative. She could invent things day and night, stage little performances with her sister, and draw endlessly. I prepared her for first grade myself: she read fluently, could do sound-letter analysis, and calculated quickly, even across tens. I was so confident that I sent her to first grade before she was six.

I regretted that decision bitterly, and very quickly.

In elementary school, during tests or when she was called to the board, she would simply freeze. She knew the material. I had always been a straight-A student myself, and at home she could reason and understand perfectly well, but at school she suddenly could not say or write anything coherent.

Her teacher, an Honored Teacher of Ukraine, with all the credentials and thousands of pupils behind her, delivered a merciless verdict in second grade: “I assessed your child. No intellect.”

That time, I was the one who froze. Because I knew my child.

That was the first time I faced the question that, after 25 years of searching, eventually became my profession:

how can an obviously intelligent person understand, reason, and grasp complex things, yet in a learning situation suddenly produce a result that seems to suggest the exact opposite?

One thing I already knew with certainty: This cannot be right. Something is wrong here.

Knowledge and understanding do not simply evaporate overnight, or over a week, or at all!

I was furious. But I did not understand that the anger I poured onto my child was pushing her even further into a dead end.

I still find it hard to forgive myself for this: I caused her real harm because I joined the chorus of people who simply saw her as lazy and irresponsible. For a long time afterward, she worked through the damage with mental health professionals. I apologize to her every time we talk about that period.

But it showed me very clearly that there can be an enormous distance between “knows” and “can show what she knows right now.”

What happens between “I see” and “I understand”

Many years later, I came across a study that, at first glance, had nothing to do with learning difficulties.

It was about creativity. About drawing.

In 2026, the journal Brain and Cognition published a study in which 32 art students trained in observational drawing for 16 weeks. They were compared with a control group of 19 students. Before and after the training, their brains were examined using 7-tesla functional MRI.

After 16 weeks, the researchers found changes in functional connectivity across brain networks, including networks involved in attention, cognitive processing, and complex coordination. The authors describe substantial neuroplasticity associated with sustained drawing practice.

What caught my attention was this: what is a person actually doing when they learn to draw? They look at an object.

Simple enough, right? Not really.

You have to see the form. The proportions, distances, angles, perspective. You have to notice the light, the tone, and the position of one part in relation to another.

Then all of that has to be translated into movement of the hand. Draw a line. Evaluate what happened. Compare it with what you see. Find the error, correct it, check again.

In other words, the person keeps moving through the same cycle:

see → analyze → build an internal representation → act → check → adjust.

That is serious cognitive work.

Creativity forces us to think precisely

We are used to placing creativity somewhere off to the side of learning. Mathematics, reading, writing: those are the serious things.

Drawing, music, modeling in clay: that is just creativity. Something enjoyable, a break from “real learning.”

But drawing demands extraordinary cognitive and practical precision.

You cannot draw what you have not actually seen.

You cannot reproduce a proportion accurately if you have not compared.

You cannot correct a line if you have not noticed exactly where it is wrong.

And this is already very close to what we do in learning.

By “we,” I mean me. Not school. We build understanding.

Now take something as ordinary as handwriting

With drawing, it is more or less obvious: you look, analyze, and translate what you see into movement of the hand.

But what about writing?

We are so used to writing that we barely notice how complex and multi-step the operation actually is. To write a letter by hand, it is not enough simply to recognize it. You have to remember its shape, direction, and sequence of movements, position the symbol in space, and recreate it with your own hand every single time.

Typing is fundamentally different. For any letter, the action is essentially the same: find the right key and press it.

And the brain notices the difference.

In a 2024 study, researchers recorded brain activity in 36 university students while they wrote words by hand with a pen and while they typed them on a keyboard. During handwriting, patterns of connectivity between different brain regions were more extensive. The authors relate this to the fact that the hand has to form each letter precisely while the brain simultaneously receives visual, motor, and proprioceptive information.

It becomes even more interesting in children who are only beginning to encounter writing and reading.

In one experiment, five-year-old children learned letters in three ways: they wrote them themselves, traced ready-made forms, or typed them on a keyboard. Later, the children were simply shown those letters while their brains were scanned.

After freehand writing, the network associated with reading became more active when the children saw the letters.

In a more recent experiment with 50 children who could not yet read, those who learned new letters and words through handwriting later named the letters, wrote them, and recognized them in words better than children who had worked with the same symbols on a keyboard.

The old-school instruction to “write it out by hand” turns out not to be quite so primitive after all.

Because when a person creates a symbol with their own hand, they are not simply looking at a ready-made letter.

They build it:

• form becomes movement,

• movement leaves a trace,

• the eye sees the result.

• The brain compares that result with what it intended to create.

  
  

  Drawing, handwriting, and modeling in clay share one critically important feature:

a thought has to travel from an internal image into a concrete, visible form.

Why a hundred repetitions sometimes do not help

One of the strangest things about working with bright children is that they can do something correctly many times and then make that same maddening mistake all over again.

An adult sees this and reaches a perfectly logical conclusion: they need more repetition. Write it again. Read it again. Do ten more exercises.

But by the hundredth repetition, it should be obvious that the problem is not the amount of practice.

A person can memorize a word, a rule, or a definition without having a stable internal model of what it actually means.

You can see this very easily if you ask the person not to repeat the definition, but to show what it means.

And that is where things get interesting.

How do you model the word “if” in clay?

In the Davis® method, clay is used not as a fine-motor exercise. And not simply to make the session more fun. Although it does that too. )

It has a different function. The person has to create a model of meaning.

In the specific Davis Symbol Mastery® exercise, letters and symbols are made from clay, along with three-dimensional models of word meanings. Short, high-frequency words are especially important because their meanings are often difficult to simply picture in the mind.

Take the word “if”. What exactly does it mean?

Close your eyes and picture the meaning, not the word, not the letters.

What do you get? *Spoiler: probably nothing. Because it is an abstract word.

How do you show its meaning in a way that makes it understandable? Suddenly, this turns out to be a complex intellectual task. The word “if” is connected to understanding cause-and-effect relationships.

You have to understand the relationship between events. There is a condition. There is something that may happen if that condition is met. You have to invent a situation in which that relationship is visible, arrange the elements, and show the connection. Then you have to check whether the model really means “if,” rather than something vaguely similar.

Creating a clay model like this acts almost like a telescope, bringing the problem into view. If a child has ADHD and their understanding of cause and effect is impaired, this kind of work makes that very clear.

This is exactly why I find it so interesting to place modern research on drawing and handwriting next to this practical Davis principle.

Complex activity that combines perception, spatial processing, attention, movement, planning, creation, checking, and correction is genuine cognitive work.

That is why the phrase “creativity develops thinking” stopped being a pretty educational slogan for me a long time ago.

So why can someone with strong visual thinking still struggle at school?

Some people think very easily in images. They see the whole situation at once. They grasp relationships quickly. They can imagine an object from different sides, replay an entire scene in their mind, and arrive at a solution that someone else reaches through a step-by-step chain of reasoning.

This is powerful thinking.

And then you put a page of text in front of that person.

Now the rules change. A letter has to remain that exact letter. The sequence of symbols matters. A small word that evokes nothing vivid in the imagination cannot simply be skipped.

In mathematics, a sign has an exact meaning. In a sentence, words like “before” and “after” can change the entire structure of an event.

And suddenly, a person who handles big images and complex ideas beautifully trips over tiny symbols.

That is why I am interested in more than the mistake itself

If a child writes a word incorrectly, of course I see the error. But that is already the end of the story.

I want to know what happened before it. What did the child see? What did they imagine? Was there meaning? At what point did confidence disappear? And what happened to attention?

Did they notice that something had gone wrong? What do they do when they lose the thread?

And most importantly: can they gradually learn to notice this for themselves?

Because a person cannot spend their whole life with someone beside them saying:

you got distracted just now, you did not understand that, you lost the word here.

Stop here. Check this point.

Real change begins when that control moves inside the person.

When they begin to see their own thinking for themselves.

And what about my daughter?

She passed life’s real test brilliantly. At nineteen, she moved to another continent on her own. She handled every real-life problem that came with that move by herself.

Today she lives in California. She runs her own business. She does creative work.

And when I think of that little girl who froze at the board, and of the words “No intellect,” that verdict sounds especially absurd now.

Perhaps that is why I love clay so much.

With clay, it is very hard to pretend that you understand.

But once you do understand, you can literally see it.

Sources

Safai A., Katz J.S., Bondy B., Deshpande G. Neural insights into observational drawing: A longitudinal resting state functional connectivity study using 7 T MRI. Brain and Cognition. 2026;192:106376. DOI: 10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106376.

Katz J.S. et al. Observational drawing in the brain: A longitudinal exploratory fMRI study. Neuropsychologia. 2021;160:107960. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107960.

Van der Weel F.R.R., Van der Meer A.L.H. Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology. 2024;14:1219945. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945.

James K.H., Engelhardt L. The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education. 2012.

Ibaibarriaga G., Acha J., Perea M. The impact of handwriting and typing practice in children’s letter and word learning: Implications for literacy development. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 2025;253:106195. DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2025.106195.

Davis Dyslexia Association International. Davis® Program Standards; Davis Symbol Mastery®.