Imran Hossain

RA @BIGD_BracU | Journalist @tbsnewsbd | Econ grad @JUniv_edu | Math MS @ AUST

[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.

[GFed🇺🇸 @GfedGoCrazy]

April fools doesn’t hit the same living in a misinformation epidemic

[Pradyumna (in Bay Area) @PradyuPrasad]

i think economics as a profession will change rapidly. everyone can now do data analysis at the drop of a hat. things that were award winning papers 20 years ago are five second codex prompts

[Imran Hossain @ImranH_47]

@asallen @b_hvrd Even this 5y/o Windows 11 reaction video has it

[Pedro Domingos @pmddomingos]

AI career:
1. Get PhD from top school
2. Work for DeepMind/OpenAI/Anthropic for 6 months
3. Quit and start your own neolab with billions in funding
4. Fail to achieve AGI but retire rich

[MIT CSAIL @MIT_CSAIL]

Andrej Karpathy, Eureka Labs founder & former Director of AI at Tesla, breaks down how LLMs like ChatGPT "download the Internet."

Watch the full beginner-friendly breakdown here: https://t.co/doph3alGnE

[Jeremy Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk]

Whether or not you care about foreign aid, you should be very worried about what DOGE is doing to @USAID right now.

Breaching highly classified systems and unlawfully attempting to unilaterally dissolve an independent federal agency.

This is a test run.

🧵

[𝗡𝘂𝗻𝗼 𝗣𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗮 @nunopgpalma]

Economic History is a dying field.

This is so in the West at least. (I'm a bit more optimistic about China, for now.)

The causes are complex. But this is the truth. So, if you are an interested graduate student, by all means go on. Yet do it for the right, intellectual, reasons

[The Business Standard @tbsnewsbd]

A video from Jashore Jamia Islamia Madrasah has sparked widespread controversy.

Link in Comments

#controversyvideo #Jashore #madrasahstudents #TBSNews

[Sam Norris @sambnorris]

Come work for me!

I'm hiring a predoc starting this summer to work closely with me on projects in criminal justice and labor economics.

There is no due date, but I'll start looking at applications in early January.

[Danial Lashkari @DanialLashkari]

RA Hire Alert:
I'm hiring an RA to work with me on the economics of technological growth, innovation, & AI. The position is based at MIT (FutureTech). Please spread the word: https://t.co/VDYByD5R7s

[Syed Rafsan Ali @SyedRafsanAli2]

Using Meta’s RWI dataset, I mapped the wealth distribution across Bangladesh. The map reveals that wealth is heavily concentrated in Dhaka and Chittagong, while the northern and southern regions still lag behind, highlighting the need for more balanced regional development.

[Imran Hossain @ImranH_47]

@RidoanSabbir

[Vindhya Buthpitiya @vindib_]

PhD applications. A thread - particularly for students from the global south applying to the UK (1). This is wholly subjective and from the perspective of someone who has been on both sides of this process now. Other academics may have different opinions- these are just mine.

[Zaeem-Al Ehsan @zaeemal_]

LMAO the audacity

[Danila Serra @danilaserra_eco]

Applications are open for our PhD in Economics @TAMUECON!

We offer these fields of specialization: Public/Labor Economics, Industrial Organization, Experimental and Behavioural Economics, Economic Theory, Econometrics & Macroeconomics.

Our PhD students are our pride!

🧵1/4

[Robert Metcalfe @RDMetcalfe]

To all economics PhD applicants, we would like to draw your attention to the PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

The PhD is for economists and scientists interested in issues related to the environment, climate change, energy, development, poverty, health, transport, inequality, labor, political economy, and public policy more generally.

With an inclusion of the natural sciences and/or engineering, the program is designed to provide a deep understanding of the interaction between natural and social systems.

[Imran Hossain @ImranH_47]

Studying abroad for undergraduate degrees is popular in Bangladesh, but many students are unaware of fully funded opportunities for high school students.

In my latest piece on TBS, I have explored some of them.

#scholarships #summerschool

https://t.co/E2x9s37lCK

[Rozhina Ghanavi @_ghnn_]

there should be a proper age when u don't have to take exams anymore cause life has already tested u in all the possible ways