Why do we have different handwriting even though we all learn to write the same letters(in our respective languages, of course)?
In: Biology
Human brains are really, *really* good at pattern-matching. (so good we have problems with false-positives a lot of the time!)
Letters are symbols with meanings. When you see the letter “K”, you know both that it’s name is “K”, but also that it is associated with a “kuh-” sound.
One effect of our really-aggressive-pattern-matching brains is that something doesn’t need to be *exactly* the same as something else for our brain to make the connection. So two people can write “k” slightly differently from each other, but both people will still recognize each other’s “k” for the symbol that it is.
In a real sense, “good handwriting” is really just “easy-to-recognize the symbols”, while “poor handwriting” is “harder-to-recognize” the symbols. Because we don’t **need* them to all be precise, people aren’t going to write them all the same way.
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