Gemma Walsh

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

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.

[Gemma Walsh @DramaGems]

@MrPowellCHS Thank you to all for making the trip so fun! They look like they’ve had the best time! 🤩

[Gemma Walsh @DramaGems]

@AskCoachKev Send

[Hamilton @HamiltonMusical]

Inimitable. The original. #Hamilten

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

You may not perceive yourself as others do

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

Today's Poetry Thread: QUESTIONS

I love this one. Feel free to add poems.

[dailySTEM Chris Woods @dailystem]

Hey teachers…if your students have ever said “Why are we learning this” this scene from Person of Interest is the absolute perfect answer...
#PiDay

[Sarah Parry @SarahWoods66]

‘It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade,’ Charles Dickens

[Cian McCarthy @arealmofwonder]

"I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I, and you are you." 🌿🌸🌼🌿

• Henry Scott Holland •

[Gemma Walsh @DramaGems]

@MrPowellCHS Joe had a great time! Many memories made! Thanks all! 🙌

[Sam Cannon Art @SamCannonArt]

Two very long, very thin pictures.

One brand new (one the left), one from a couple of years ago.

With today's wind and rain, the words (African Proverb) seem very appropriate.

[Andie 🧚🏻 @af_english123]

Finished this off so I could have a peaceful half term - help yourself! 41 pages of Macbeth revision guide, very much the same idea as the last two I've made. All my revision guides are in this folder here - hope it helps your Y11s! https://t.co/RDmlBu7aCF

[Sam Cannon Art @SamCannonArt]

Dear world. I see so much pain and madness right now. And feel utterly powerless to 'fix' a single thing.

All I can offer is this picture and the words of Hafiz of Shiraz.
'I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.'

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Similarities between the human body and nature 🧵

1. Lungs and tree branches

[Gwalia United @GwaliaUnited]

A big thank you to our mascots yesterday, Ty Celyn Under 10s, it was great to have you at the game, thank you for your support! 👏

📸 @crusadin_photo

@tycelynFC

#OurClubOurNationOurStory #GwaliaTogetherUnited

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

I was talking to a grandmother last week about schooling. ‘I can see the difference’ she said. ‘When my children were young, primary school was relaxed. If the weather was good, they went outside and ran around. If they were sick, they stayed at home. Now with my grandchildren they are seated in desks for more of the day and if they are ill, they are worried that they’ll lose their 100% attendance for the term. The pressure is on to pass their phonics test when they are six and then to learn their times tables at speed by the time they are nine. They feel it and their parents feel it too’.

There’s lots of talk about SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) at the moment, and how increasing numbers of children are being identified as SEND. It’s less common to ask questions about what SEND really means, and whether the education system creates more children ‘with SEND’ as it becomes more pressured and rigid.

For what SEND really means is that a child cannot learn in the way which mainstream education expects. They cannot keep up with expectations, either for academic work or for behaviour. SEND is something which happens in the interaction between a child and the education system. In a system where no 6-year-old is expected to sit still and learn to write their name, then a 6-year-old who just wants to run around outside isn't a problem. In a system where everyone is meant to be able to read by age 6, then they are.

We know from research that if a child is young in their year, they are more likely to be identified as ‘having SEND’. We know that summer born boys are far more likely to be identified as ‘having SEND’ than autumn born girls. We know that the impact of this immaturity resonates through the years, with the youngest in the year doing less well at GCSE. We know that the number of children ‘with SEND’ is going up year on year.

It's not really plausible that more children each year have difficulties in learning, nor that being born in August makes you more likely to have learning problems than if you are born a few weeks later in September.

It’s far more likely that in the push to ‘drive up standards’ the education system is becomes less, not more, suited to how children develop and learn. It’s more likely that the system is penalising immaturity – and children are inherently immature. That isn’t a lack or a defect, it’s a defining part of childhood.

As the education system becomes more rigid and pressured, we’d expect more children not to be able to manage without adaptations. This is exactly what we see. Those children are holding up the flag for all the others, saying that this system is not child-friendly and doesn’t take account of developmental needs and differences.

What if, instead of having higher expectations of the children, we had higher expectations of the education system? What if those expectations were of flexibility, reducing pressure and prioritising lifelong learning and wellbeing instead of short-term testing?

What if we saw the increasing number of children ‘with SEND’ as a sign that the system isn’t working for the many ways in which children develop, rather than a sign that more and more children have learning difficulties? We’ll never sort the ‘SEND crisis’ until we start looking at SEND as an interaction between children and the education system. The more rigid the system is, the more children it will fail.

Illustration by @_MissingTheMark from the book A Different Way to Learn.

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

Mother nature is a math geek. ✍️

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

8 year olds completing old sayings
https://t.co/Oq01le16ki