Chalkboards > Whiteboards

Lately I’ve noticed people have been missing out on one of life’s greatest joys: Chalkboards.

I don’t blame people for not knowing. Chalkboards used to be made with asbestos. And ever since we found out asbestos causes cancer, we’ve been slowly weaning ourselves off from products that would otherwise be pretty good (once you removed the cancer part). And as it turns, we did. Chalkboards can now be made without asbestos. #progress

That hasn’t stopped every teacher and architect from installing whiteboards around the world, though, very much to the detriment of the human race.

I’m not joking. Chalkboards are superior to whiteboards. Ask anyone who’s ever seriously used both for a living. There’s a rhythm and a taste that chalkboards carry, like a sweet melody playing every time you write with chalk that whiteboards cannot equal.

But I’m not quite sure why. And I’ve been trying to figure out why. Whiteboards have this modern, eclectic annoyance I can’t pin down. But chalkboards are reminiscent of mornings with a hot cup of coffee. Then I started discovering all sorts of principles about how brains learn. I started stumbling across patterns. And I think I finally found a pretty good answer (to be fair, this is mostly conjecture with the occasional scientific evidence, so I could be wrong) But I think there are some major reasons why chalkboards just feel better to use than whiteboards.

Muscles

For starters, humans are physical creatures. We spend much of our lives moving. We’ve evolved for it. In a way you could say, you’re the most engaged when you’re walking through the world. Your brain lights up when you move. You enter a meditative state where all sorts of fantastic ideas start popping into your head.

You could extend this as a general principle: The more muscles you use during an activity, the more of yourself you engage. I suspect it’s because when you use more muscles, you essentially give the brain more “sensory data” to work with. Writing is no different. And if you’ve ever written on a chalkboard, you’ll notice chalk offers something markers do not: Resistance.

Writing with chalk is more demanding. Every chalk stroke has some resistance. That “resistance” requires a little bit more effort on your part, a little bit more muscle. In turn, the brain just has more sensory data to work with.

I believe the brain uses that resistance data to make predictions about where your arm is in space. Then as you wear the chalk down, the brain has to constantly adjust the position of the arm by a few millimeters, so you’re always dynamically adjusting your arms. That constant haptic feedback is pleasurable.The brain uses it to accelerate its learning and make predictions about where the arm will be moment-to-moment.

Whiteboards on the other hand, offer little resistance and thereby, no such data for the brain to collect and make predictions from.

It’s the difference between typing on a keyboard and typing on your iPhone. It’s not the same. The body is accustomed to getting feedback from reality. Glass and smoothness are alien to our monkey-lizard brains. The brain has very little to work with when typing on glass.

There’s another aspect to writing on chalkboards that a lot of people miss too:

The “ping” of chalk as it hits the chalkboard offers a pattern, something like a musical quality to our brains. The chalk hits the chalkboard when we expected it. That’s timing. That’s expectation matching with reality. And as that sound travels to our ears and the neurons anticipating it receive the data, the neural systems you use to predict and make sense of the world strengthen. So you get rewarded. That’s what it means to learn: to successfully predict what’ll happen next.

You get no such feedback from a whiteboard. It’s silent even as you come into contact with it again and again. No sound. No feedback. No dopamine. No pattern. No fun.

Music is pleasurable partly because it’s predictable. We know what’s gonna happen next, and when it comes true, our body rewards us.

Using a chalkboard is similar to listening to music or playing a game. It has implicit physical structures that allow you to learn better. More of you gets involved.

So if you want to learn better, don’t use whiteboards.

Use a chalkboard.