Edinburgh Fortean Society

Oldest Fortean Society in Scotland. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Mastodon : @[email protected]
BlueSky :

[HoaxEye @hoaxeye]

Also: in 1997, Meier's ex-wife, Kalliope, told interviewers that his photos were of spaceship models he crafted with items like trash can lids, carpet tacks and other household objects 😎

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

The longest line of sight in the U.K. has been seen only a few times, and photographed once. In 2015, Kris Williams was atop Snowdon in perfect conditions and managed to snap The Merrick in Southern Scotland. A remarkable distance of 232km (144 miles).

[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.

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

@atlasobscura Painted in what I assume is something akin to Falun Red?

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

After the talks there will be an auction of mostly books (some DVDs) for group funds and a charity donation. Please bring money and if you have anything you would like to donate that would be awesome too.

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

Next EdFortSoc: Wednesday 13th of May

Fort Shorts!

Fort Shorts are mini-talks – either works in progress or small items that wouldn’t fill a whole slot – anyone who would like to offer a short talk please contact Gordon.

The Royal Oak
1 Infirmary Street
Edinburgh
7.30pm, £1

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

After the talks there will be an auction of mostly books (some DVDs) for group funds and a charity donation. Please bring money and if you have anything you would like to donate that would be awesome too.

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

Next EdFortSoc: Wednesday 13th of May

Fort Shorts!

Fort Shorts are mini-talks – either works in progress or small items that wouldn’t fill a whole slot – anyone who would like to offer a short talk please contact Gordon.

The Royal Oak
1 Infirmary Street
Edinburgh
7.30pm, £1

[Tom Lee Rutter @carniefilms]

"Is this low budget compendium of superstitions the most fortean film ever made?"

My giddy Aunt! Not 1, but 3 pages in the latest issue (470) of @forteantimes ! A film review and interview with yours truly on The Pocket Film of Superstitions!

Get it in all good newsagents now!

[Bill Mitchell @mitchellvii]

What's the spookiest thing that ever happened to you? We're talking real glitch in the Matrix stuff.

For me it was back when I was living in Los Angeles, I had lost my wallet. I looked everywhere for that wallet. I mean everywhere. I had to replace my ID, all my credit cards, everything.

So one morning a year later I wake up and go into the kitchen to make coffee and what's sitting right in the middle of the kitchen counter?

My wallet!

I'm like, there is no way that wallet has been here the whole time! I had cleaned that kitchen hundreds of times since I had lost it.

Anyway that was really spooky.

[chris iddon @moog77]

BBC News - Tales of tunnels underneath Oxfordshire village prove to be true - BBC News
https://t.co/CSCkM5xrwd sounds like something that would interest @jpwarchaeology

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

@OrkneyLibrary Forget Akira Kurosawa and all those other acknowledged inspirations, it's obvious George Lucas just trawled your archive.

[Orkney Library @OrkneyLibrary]

Happy Star Wars Day everybody! #StarWars as photographs from the #Orkney Archive photographic collection. ⭐️

#MayThe4thBeWithYou #StarWarsDay

[The Megalithic Portal Ancient Sites & Stones @megportal]

There's not much to see at Hazleton North now - a slight raise in a Gloucestershire field 20mi NE of Stroud. But 5,700 years ago it looked like this. And DNA studies of bones from inside has made for a remarkable discovery - a five-generation Neolithic family tree. Thread: 1/

[J. Michael Straczynski @straczynski]

I may have figured this out. The shape is perfect for carrying thread before spindles. One dodecahedron could carry a ton of thread in a very compact form and one bag could hold many colors, easily spooled out then tied off when done. The holes kept it from being too heavy.

[ASSAP Paranormal @ASSAParanormal]

A truly rare treat discovered from the ASSAP Archives recorded during Lockdown, an upbeat, full of character, abundant with artefacts and stories! Going to throw the doors open to ASSAP Members and beyond, this Thursday 7pm. Join us!

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

Next EdFortSoc: Wed 8th April (Tonight!)
Our 27th anniversary meeting! An evening of fun. There may be cake, a chance for Fortean charades and a quiz. Anyone who'd like to contribute a question for the quiz please contact Gordon. The Royal Oak 1 Infirmary Street 7.30pm, £1

[LondonForteanSociety @forteanlondon.bsky.social @ForteanLondon]

Strange Central 2026: Mysteries, Monsters, Ghosts, and UFOs
Online and @ConwayHall
Saturday 18 April 10 am - 5 pm
https://t.co/9apjSjul0Y
(1/8)

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

@TheBrochProject @Whisky_Blender Loch, Broch and Two Smoky Barrels?

[Edinburgh Fortean Society @EdinFortSoc]

Next EdFortSoc: Wed 14th January
@CharlesPaxton4 will be talking on Nessies Before Nessie: A Scientific and Cultural History of Scottish Sea Serpents Until 1900
The Royal Oak
1 Infirmary Street
Edinburgh
7.30pm, £1