Al Crozon

Husband to a fantastic woman and father of three great kids.

[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.

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@damsmokedamgood He’ll be on a Pet Detective reboot in 5 years.

[BrettYoung @BrettYoungSeeds]

There are only five days left to submit your truck for the 2026 Farm Trucks of BrettYoung calendar!

Give your farm truck some love by replying to this post with a pic of it and #FarmTrucksofBY & have the chance for it be part of the calendar! (Oh, & maybe win some cool prizes!)

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

I've worked in industry for 20 years. Many studies are funded by industry.

Some people say: "Don't trust them. They're biased."

But here's the uncomfortable truth:

Without industry studies, most of the safety data you rely on wouldn't exist.

Let me explain. Want to approve a new pesticide or drug?

You need data:

→ Toxicology.
→ Residue data.
→ Carcinogenicity.
→ Environmental fate.
→ Endocrine disruption.
→ Reproductive studies.
→ Chronic exposure tests.

These studies are required by regulators. Guess who pays for them?

Industry doesn’t do these studies for fun. They do them because they’re legally mandated.

EFSA, EPA, ECHA, FDA, ANSES - all require massive data packages.

Some submissions are 100,000+ pages. They take years and cost millions.

No university is going to do that.

Industry studies don’t stay behind closed doors. They’re:

→ Audited.
→ Publicly available.
→ Reviewed by independent experts.
→ Summarized in regulatory assessments.

They’re not hiding in some secret vault. They’re sitting on EFSA’s website.

"But they’re biased!"

Yes - every study has potential for bias. That’s why the methods matter.

Industry studies follow guidelines, GLP protocols, and strict regulatory checklists.

Not blog-science. Not cherry-picked stats.

Structured.
Transparent.
Reproducible.

Academics often publish hypothesis-driven research.

Industry? They test everything:

→ What happens at low dose?
→ What happens over 2 years?
→ What if the animal is pregnant?
→ What about bees? Soil? Water?

This isn’t just science.
It’s exhaustive documentation.

EFSA doesn’t rubber-stamp anything.
Neither does the EPA.

They dissect every study line by line.
Then they ask for more.

If the study was junk - they’d reject it.
If you throw out industry studies, here's what happens:

→ No new medicines.
→ No safer chemicals.
→ No food innovations.
→ No climate-friendly fertilizers.
→ No modern toxicology databases.

You don’t get precaution.
You get paralysis.

So what should we do?

→ Push for open science.
→ Demand transparency.
→ Allow independent reanalysis.

But don’t discard industry studies just because of who funded them.

Evaluate the evidence - not the logo on the lab coat.

Industry studies are not perfect.
But without them, we’d still be guessing.

Science isn’t about who you trust.
It’s about what you can prove - under scrutiny.

And these studies face more scrutiny than most.

Understand the process.
Read the methods.
Follow the data.

Not the headlines.

Seen a story that dismissed a study just because it was industry-funded? Share it.

♻️ Repost to push back against bias in the name of science.

[BrettYoung @BrettYoungSeeds]

Want your farm truck featured in the #FarmTrucksofBY 2026 calendar?

Reply to this post with a photo of your truck and the hashtag for a chance to win! Each of the 12 winners will get a roadside safety kit, a snow brush, and the calendar for 2026. Let's see those beaters!

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@damsmokedamgood I’m two days for two eating at @damsmokedamgood .
I think I’ll go three for three!

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@jchristi111 @akmshs @EM_RESUS It should be BEFAST
Balance
Eyes
Face
Arms
Speech
Time

[Kevin Blair @CattleNut]

This Brett Young variety is seriously cool. Stay tuned.

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@loopholefarms I agree. It’s the most stressful day of the year. There’s gotta be a better way.

[Carl Gibb @CarlGibb2021]

Saw this Blast from the past today. Good times.

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@TrishEMeyers @Kieran_C_Meyers @UofSAgros @agbiousask Happy Birthday Kieran. Great cake Trish.

[Nufarm Seeds North America @NufarmSeedsNA]

Nuseed canola demo sites in Lethbridge, Porta La Praire, Swan River, Outlook, and Colonsay looks great. Contact your local Coop retail for details. https://t.co/Nct8abEcQY

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@Badsmoke23 @CamiDRyan Slyders, Clubbers, Bar K.

[Bell Let's Talk @Bell_LetsTalk]

It’s Bell Let’s Talk Day! Check out how these celebrities look after their own mental health and join the conversation. For each video view, Bell donates an additional 5¢ to Canadian mental health initiatives. #BellLetsTalk

[Brit Dort @britdort]

#BellLetsTalk

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@damsmokedamgood Gotta have cilantro!

[Saskatchewan Roughriders @sskroughriders]

Jersey Giveaway 🙏

🔁 this post to be entered to win a new jersey, courtesy of @KalTire!

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@sskroughriders Candle Lake, Sask.

[Al Crozon @CrozonAl]

@StLouisBlues Saskatoon, Saskatchewan - Let’s Go Blues!

[Bell Let's Talk @Bell_LetsTalk]

Today, every view of this video helps create positive change. All you need to do is watch it and Bell will donate 5¢ more to Canadian mental health initiatives. Retweet to help spread the word! #BellLetsTalk