1889books

Indie-publisher, copy-editing, ghost-writing

[1889books @1889books]

The best ever novel set in Sheffield. Doherty was a better writer than Alan Sillitoe. Get it exclusively here: https://t.co/2xmMVgV4FA

[1889books @1889books]

Coming 4th June: new novel from Prashant Pinge
"Kuku Mehta – Knight in Shining Armour."
Set around a chaotic Indian destination wedding, it is a light-hearted romantic comedy inspired: Bertie Wooster meets Bollywood.
E-book can be pre-ordered now.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[1889books @1889books]

New whacky book by Michael Glover of "111 Places in Sheffield That You Shouldn't Miss" fame. Out soon. But you can pick one up now from www.1889books/michael-glover

[Stanchion Books - the football bookshop 📚 @StanchionBooks]

𝐍𝐄𝐖 | THE GOLDEN BOY OF MAN UTD AND SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY by @iainmccartney

Brand new biography of Albert Quixall, a pioneer of the modern game, tinged with stardom, glamour and tragedy.

@SteveK1889

🛒 https://t.co/wittaoDHGM

[1889books @1889books]

Samuel Holberry - revolutionary democrat 1814-1842 https://t.co/XKTqMG5Q5a via @YouTube

[Alan Davis @AlanDavis1893]

@MatGuy5 @1889books Another winner Mat, who would have thought that I'd be so interested in Moldova and that there could be such a powerful argument for the Nations League. A great read.

[1889books @1889books]

New Sheffield Books https://t.co/DwUq43HArd

[Mat Guy @MatGuy5]

Standing on the Shoulders of Titans: San Marino, Life and Football at the Bottom of the Nations League

Now available to pre-order Through @1889books

https://t.co/0SD2RZPiq8

Also exploring Malta 🇲🇹 Latvia 🇱🇻 Moldova 🇲🇩 Liechtenstein 🇱🇮

I hope you enjoy

[Mat Guy @MatGuy5]

The perfect hat-trick, twice!
Left foot, right foot, header (in book terms)

What a ride! None of which would have been possible without the vision and hard work of @LuathPress and @1889books

Thank you for putting your faith in me.

And there’s more to come…

[1889books @1889books]

The Lives of Stanley B https://t.co/19Nn1bxXOu via @YouTube

[Mat Guy @MatGuy5]

@AlanDavis1893 Actually you are. And very soon:

Standing on the Shoulders of Titans: San Marino, Life and Football at the Bottom of the Nations League

Out soon through @1889books

[BBNYA 2026 - The Indie Book Award @BBNYA_Official]

A big #BBNYA2025 welcome to Sceadu by
@PrashantPinge

Welcome aboard and best of luck!!

[1889books @1889books]

My three favourite reads of 2024 for @Shepherd_books https://t.co/PLEvUQ6v13

[1889books @1889books]

Out 15th October. Still time to benefit from the exclusive pre-publication offer: https://t.co/OIzkbkdaG9
24m

[1889books @1889books]

Lovely (and accurate) review of Wadia by Rohit Trilokekar: https://t.co/fcrfuYHsRe

[1889books @1889books]

It's amazing to get feedback from a competition. That's how it should be done! Thanks @BBNYA_Official

[1889books @1889books]

@Trilo1111

[Sheffield Authors @Sheff_Authors]

We've started the countdown clock to the deadline for our @otsfestival Shefield Short Story Competition:
https://t.co/OdvdNtyIOu Get scribblin'!

[1889books @1889books]

New from 1889 Books https://t.co/r0UtA1V3M8

[1889books @1889books]

Over a century ago, a mysterious book was written, its secrets long forgotten... until now. New YA fantasy novel available now for special pre-publication price.
https://t.co/OIzkbkdaG9

[1889books @1889books]

@Trilo1111

[BBNYA 2026 - The Indie Book Award @BBNYA_Official]

What our panelists thought about Wadia by @1889books

"This is beautifully written, detailed, fluid, informative, it instantly creates pictures of the place and people in your mind."
"This is intelligent, culturally and socially fascinating."
"I was very intrigued."