Brendan Ch'ng, PhD

@BrendanChng

Senior Lecturer @SunwayU 🇲🇾 | PhD in educational psychology 🌟 he/him

near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Joined August 2019

172 Following

79 Followers

264 Posts

BrendanChng retweeted

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

about 2 months ago

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.

ihtesham2005's tweet photo. 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.

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BrendanChng retweeted

Richard Ker

@richardker

about 2 months ago

She was born the seventh of nine children in Kuantan. Her father was a public servant who got transferred all over the country, so she grew up moving between small towns. Her mother never finished school. But her mother worked harder than anyone she knew, and believed education was everything. That belief sent Swee Lay Thein to medical school at Universiti Malaya. She graduated in 1975. Then she moved to the UK and spent the next 20 years chasing one stubborn question. Why do some patients with blood disorders suffer terribly, needing transfusions their whole lives, while others barely feel sick? The answer was hidden in a gene. Babies are born producing a special kind of hemoglobin that protects them. Then the body flips a switch and stops making it. Swee Lay wanted to know what controlled that switch. If you could keep it on, you could save millions of lives. It took her decades. She travelled across the UK collecting blood samples from families. She flew to Malawi to study a single family with 270 members across seven generations. She hit dead ends. She kept going. In 2007, she and her team found the gene. They called it BCL11A. That discovery led to Casgevy, the first FDA-approved CRISPR therapy for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. A real cure. Already changing real lives around the world. Last month, Dr Swee Lay Thein stood on a stage in Los Angeles and accepted the Breakthrough Prize, often called the Oscars of Science. She is the first Malaysian-born scientist to ever win it. In her speech she said, "As a child hanging out with my older brothers, playing on old railway tracks in Malaysia, I never imagined being here today." She dedicated the moment to her mother. The woman who never finished school. A girl from Kuantan. A mum who believed in education even though she never got one herself. A daughter whose work is now saving lives around the world. That is a Malaysian story. Tahniah, Dr Swee Lay Thein. We see you. We are proud. 🇲🇾

richardker's tweet photo. She was born the seventh of nine children in Kuantan.

Her father was a public servant who got transferred all over the country, so she grew up moving between small towns.

Her mother never finished school. But her mother worked harder than anyone she knew, and believed education was everything.

That belief sent Swee Lay Thein to medical school at Universiti Malaya. She graduated in 1975.

Then she moved to the UK and spent the next 20 years chasing one stubborn question. Why do some patients with blood disorders suffer terribly, needing transfusions their whole lives, while others barely feel sick?

The answer was hidden in a gene. Babies are born producing a special kind of hemoglobin that protects them. Then the body flips a switch and stops making it.

Swee Lay wanted to know what controlled that switch. If you could keep it on, you could save millions of lives.

It took her decades. She travelled across the UK collecting blood samples from families. She flew to Malawi to study a single family with 270 members across seven generations. She hit dead ends. She kept going.

In 2007, she and her team found the gene. They called it BCL11A.

That discovery led to Casgevy, the first FDA-approved CRISPR therapy for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. A real cure. Already changing real lives around the world.

Last month, Dr Swee Lay Thein stood on a stage in Los Angeles and accepted the Breakthrough Prize, often called the Oscars of Science.

She is the first Malaysian-born scientist to ever win it.
In her speech she said, "As a child hanging out with my older brothers, playing on old railway tracks in Malaysia, I never imagined being here today."

She dedicated the moment to her mother. The woman who never finished school.

A girl from Kuantan. A mum who believed in education even though she never got one herself. A daughter whose work is now saving lives around the world.

That is a Malaysian story.

Tahniah, Dr Swee Lay Thein. We see you. We are proud. 🇲🇾

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BrendanChng retweeted

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

about 2 months ago

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario. a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose. the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant. he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests. Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time. GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead. Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on. Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for. then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company." GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing. then he splits the users by income. Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%. 18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time. so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for. it isn't recommending the best option for you. it's reading the room. and the room is paying. read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b

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BrendanChng retweeted

Aizuddin M Anuar @aizuddin_anuar

4 months ago

Good news! I've submitted the final manuscript for my first academic book about Malaysia to @BrisUniPress It has a beautiful cover, a release date, and a landing page! ⏲️ Out on 1 Sept 2026 🖼️ Rumah Terengganu by Shima Abu Hazim More information: https://t.co/XU6pYSkanA

aizuddin_anuar's tweet photo. Good news! I've submitted the final manuscript for my first academic book about Malaysia to @BrisUniPress

It has a beautiful cover, a release date, and a landing page!

⏲️ Out on 1 Sept 2026
🖼️ Rumah Terengganu by Shima Abu Hazim

More information:
https://t.co/XU6pYSkanA https://t.co/4f11bAAlvB

Who to follow

Marcin Zajenkowski

@MZajenkowski

psychologist, professor at University of Warsaw

BrendanChng retweeted

Asian Social Psychology @AASP_AJSP

4 months ago

SPSSI's Researchers in the Global South Grants Program is open for application! Supports social science research in Africa, Latin America, Asia & more. Up to $2k for PhD holders / $1k for pre-doctoral researchers. SPSSI members only. Deadline: May 1, 2026. https://t.co/Lm0QkW2PFe

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Brendan Ch'ng, PhD

@BrendanChng

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