快猫短视频

IN THE LATE 1950s, New York City was in the grip of panic over a series of explosions caused by the 鈥淢ad Bomber鈥�. On 26 December 1956, the Bomber wrote to a New York newspaper explaining the various grievances he had against New York state. The newspaper printed his letters on its front page. But when it gave a graphologist鈥檚 interpretation of the Mad Bomber鈥檚 handwriting, his vanity was piqued鈥攈e wrote to the newspaper to complain about the interpretation, providing more clues about himself and leading to his eventual capture.

Oddly enough this seems to be the only properly documented instance where the 鈥渟cience鈥� of graphology鈥攎aking inferences about personality from handwriting鈥攈as been truly successful. To date more than 200 objective scientific studies have concluded the technique is of no practical value.

But despite scientists鈥� best efforts to give graphology a decent burial, it lives on with horrifying vigour. Graphology companies claim that as many as 400 different features of handwriting can reveal the writer鈥檚 undisclosed, even unconscious, mental states. And while between 5 and 10 per cent of British and US companies happily use the technique for recruitment, it is used even more throughout the rest of Europe.

At last there is some research that seems to explain why graphology has had such an unholy afterlife. Strangely, new computational methods for analysing handwriting may even breathe new life into the technique, suggesting it reveals something about our brains and minds after all, and perhaps even our health.

According to Roy King and Derek Koehler of the University of Waterloo in Ontario there鈥檚 a simple reason for graphology鈥檚 popularity and persistence. It seems that ordinary members of the public intuitively come to exactly the same conclusions as the graphology experts about what handwriting features mean, so naturally we鈥檙e quite happy to go along with them.

King and Koehler selected a group of volunteers who knew nothing of graphology theories. They were given writing samples paired up randomly with personality profiles of the writers, and asked if they could see any links between recurring handwriting features and personality type. Despite the randomness of the pairings, the volunteers still saw the same sort of associations that graphology describes.

For example, both groups conclude that untidy handwriting is linked with depression鈥攁lthough there is no scientific support for this conclusion. The volunteer group also thought they saw correlations between apparently fast handwriting and impulsivity, and upward sloping lines were seen as a sign of optimism. They linked handwriting size with the extent of modesty or egoism, neatness with being organised. It seemed that both graphologists and volunteers simply equate the meanings of the words we use to describe writing styles directly to the words we use to describe personalities.

This in itself would seem to render graphology invalid for personnel selection. It has already been shown that job applicants know how to alter their handwriting to convey a false impression of orderliness and originality. But, strangely, this doesn鈥檛 mean that handwriting says nothing at all about you or your brain. The way you write is quite personal, whether you produce the movements on a small scale with your fingers and hand, or with your arm if your writing is several centimetres high on a blackboard. Even if you were writing with your toes in the sand, the style will be recognisably yours, says Alan Wing of the Sensory Motor Neuroscience Centre at the University of Birmingham. This consistency is referred to as 鈥渕otor equivalence鈥� and is important, says Wing, because it suggests that actions are encoded in the brain in terms more abstract than commands to specific muscles.

Michel Rijntjes and his colleagues at the University of Hamburg, Germany, got volunteers to write with their hands and their toes while in a brain scanner. They found that the posterior parietal cortex鈥攖he part of the brain nearest the very top of the head鈥攚as one of the main seats of writing, whichever scale or limb we use. The area is important for controlling all kinds of movements. Visual areas of the brain, surprisingly, were not very active. But this makes sense considering skilled writers complete a stroke within 100 milliseconds, leaving no time for feedback correction based on vision. We use vision only to place letters and sentences correctly on a page.

Ironically, the finding about the parietal lobe is particularly troublesome for standard graphology as the region is not strongly associated with personality鈥攚hich is thought to 鈥渞eside鈥� mostly in the frontal lobes.

But more importantly, the fact that the state of our handwriting is so clearly determined by some of the motor regions of our brain has started to lead to some surprisingly insightful analyses of illnesses that affect these regions. Subtle changes in a person鈥檚 handwriting might reveal neurological and psychiatric conditions years before other symptoms become obvious.

New technology, in the form of digitising graphic tablets, allows much more precise measurements of handwriting parameters. The tablet registers hand movements in various directions, via the tip of a specialised pen, and also logs the speeds at which different parts of the strokes are made. The information is analysed by computer.

Multiple sclerosis, dementia, Parkinson鈥檚 disease, Huntington鈥檚 chorea, schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder are just some of the conditions that affect handwriting in specific ways (see 鈥淎 written diagnosis鈥�). These findings help provide clues as to the location of the various disorders in the brain, and they could even be used to help diagnosis. Some of the conditions are remarkably difficult to tell apart, but surprisingly some of the handwriting changes are turning out to be more specific and predictable than the symptoms used to diagnose them at the moment.

For example, Paraskevi Mavrogiorgou and her team at the Clinic of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder at the University of Munich found that patients with OCD show micrographia (small handwriting), the pen accelerates for less time than usual, and the top speed reached is slower. Intriguingly, the severity of these impairments is strongly associated with just how obsessional the patients are. In other motor activities, such as repeatedly drawing the same object, however, people with OCD are more meticulous than healthy controls, so handwriting might provide a unique clue to early stages of the disease.

Ironically, it also seems that a new kind of graphology could rise from the ashes of the old. Psychiatrist Roland Mergl and his colleagues, also from the University of Munich, have found that there might be a statistically significant association between the personality trait of agreeableness and slower speed of handwriting. Funnily enough, they also suggest that the more conscientious a person is, the more irregular their repetitive drawing was鈥攑recisely the opposite conclusion traditional graphology would draw. Perhaps it really is time to write graphology off, and start again.