It's Not a Typewriter, It's a Bilateral Rhythmic Psychosocial Intervention

How to be BFFs with knitting.

You sit down, take a sheet of paper and roll it in. Making sure it’s aligned, you turn the platen a few clicks until the top of the paper peekaboos from behind the roller. And then you start.

Left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand. Each finger presses a key and meets resistance wholly different from the ghostly nothing of plastic laptop chiclets. Your fingers travel inches rather than millimeters like each one is riding a little elliptical machine. A typebar swings up, hits the ribbon, explodes a letter into the page. You hear it and feel it in your fingertips. The carriage slides one click to the right, and you strike again and again.

After a few minutes you’re not thinking about the words anymore, because the rhythm has you. Left-right-left-right, strike and slide, strike and slide. The bell rings at the end of the line and you reach up and sweep the carriage back in a full cross-body motion, arm moving right to left, resetting the whole cycle. And you go again.

You’d think that writing on an antique machine would feel stiff. But somehow because the typewriter doesn’t let you delete, you rest into knowing that forward is the only way. Forward pressure breaks through the editorial mind, sure. But you have to wonder whether something more is happening.

There’s a trauma therapy called EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — built on a mechanism called bilateral stimulation. You hold a difficult memory in mind while moving your eyes back and forth, or while a therapist alternates taps on your hands, or while you listen to tones that alternate between your ears. The rhythmic left-right pattern supposedly helps the trauma unstick by shifting the nervous system out of fight-or-flight. The distressing memory doesn’t vanish, but it loses its charge.

What researchers have found is that the type of stimulation matters less than the pattern. What matters is that it’s rhythmic, alternating, and bilateral, and it works whether you use eyes, tapping, or sound. There’s even an EMDR Drumming Protocol that uses the alternating hand movements of percussion as embodied bilateral stimulation for processing trauma.

There’s a growing clinical literature about knitting, for example, that makes the EMDR connection. The back-and-forth motion of knitting, using both hands rhythmically, constitutes bilateral stimulation in the clinical sense. Betsy Corkhill, a researcher who founded the nonprofit Stitchlinks, used to describe knitting to skeptical clinicians as “a bilateral rhythmic psychosocial intervention.” Betsy rocks.

It turns out, knitters with PTSD report fewer flashbacks. The rhythmic bilateral hand movements regulate the nervous system. Coordinated crossing of the body’s midline demands enough from the brain that it interrupts the usual anxious loops. Serotonin increases with repetitive movement and cortisol drops. And all of this happens bottom-up through the body first, with the mind following.

Now. Think about what I described at the beginning of this piece. Alternating hands, left-right-left-right. Significant force per keystroke. Rich tactile and auditory feedback on every strike. A carriage sweeping across the body and returning. A rhythm that, once established, carries you.

This is not the same activity as typing on a modern keyboard. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that keyboard typing produces far less brain engagement than handwriting, specifically because pressing uniform keys with the same simple finger movement is too easy for the brain to bother with. But, you see, they were studying modern keyboards. A manual typewriter’s movement signature is categorically different: we’re talking substantial proprioceptive and auditory feedback, babe. It shares far more with knitting and drumming than it does with a MacBook.

I haven’t found anyone who has studied manual typewriting connecting it to bilateral stimulation. But, says me, the mechanism that makes EMDR and therapeutic knitting or drumming work is the same one operating when you sit down at a manual typewriter and chunk away at the keys. It’s rhythmic, bilateral, tactile, and auditory, and engages both hemispheres through alternating coordinated hand movements.

I’m not a therapist, and this isn’t a clinical claim. But the experience I described about the performative self dropping away might have something to do with the machine itself through what it demands of your body. And it doesn’t require your permission or your understanding for it to work. In fact, it doesn’t have to be clinically approved for it to be beneficial. You just have to start striking those keys.

If you want to try writing this way, with or without a typewriter, I have a free 5-day series that gets you started.