Dr Jane

@janeo.bsky.social
Public-hlth Family Doc MPH
Part time singer
De-prescriber when safe
Climate-concerned

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

Can we change "herd immunity' to "community immunity" -and let's make a song about it @medicalaxioms @Takethatdoctors @VeritasEver @crikey_news @_PHAA_ @brookmanknight @MarieCo92176893 @TcameronTodd @DocPNW @Dr_Polarbird @EricTopol @GidMK @DGlaucomflecken @DrGCrisp @drkatmclean

[Wazza from Melbourne @Melbourne_says]

When I go back home and I’m asked what Earth was like, I’m gonna tell em it has some of the most beautiful places in the whole universe. Just like this place. 🌿

📍 Wirrawilla (meaning green trees) Rainforest Walk, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Taungurung Country.

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@stationmum101 Still seems like 1950s “values” 😔

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@RonniSalt @raywilton4 @ItsBouquet But in all seriousness how have we let this country get to this as an option

[PAW (Peter) @Peter88902568]

Erm, I think we know a ceiling toaster when we see one, thanks very much.

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@DaveSharma Sounds like a political statement not something posted without bias.
Now do the rest of Australia.
Also how much have you personally invested in negatively geared properties Dave

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@giveashitnature https://t.co/fVH4d4Ab1e

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@giveashitnature Very Monty Python on two fronts!!
The "attack of the bunny" refers to the iconic Rabbit of Caerbannog from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It appears to be a harmless, fluffy bunny guarding the entrance to the Cave of Caerbannog

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

This is the best preserved medieval street in Europe.

Recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, The Shambles in York, England has had shops trading on it for nearly a thousand years. It's older than the Crusades.

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

These houses in San Francisco are actually straight!

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@bazzacc2 Winston Churchill hey

[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.

[🍀Louie Kerr 🇮🇪💚 @LouieKerr8]

🤣☘️

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@mariana057 Bath and sink plugs

[Jenny Difficult-Frecklington-Jones 🇵🇸🍉🇮🇷 @JonesHowDareYou]

For anyone who has never met the Superb Lyrebird of Australia.

David Attenborough says it displays one of the most sophisticated voice skills within the animal kingdom—"the most elaborate, the most complex, and the most beautiful."

The chainsaw always brings tears to my eyes.

[Tony Breu @tony_breu]

1/14
Why can't you use direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) in patients with mechanical valves (MVs)?

DOACs have been one of the most important advances in my career. And yet, the presence of a MV is one of the few contraindications.

The reason highlights the unique nature of thrombus formation in those with a MV and provides insights into the evolution of human hemostasis.

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@TerenceMcCart14 So lovely. And apparently the weather is always perfect there too:)

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Something interesting you might not have realized:

A number of words in English are NOUNS when you stress the FIRST syllable...

But VERBS when you stress the SECOND syllable.

-SUSpect/susPECT
-CONflict/conFLICT
-PROtest/proTEST
-CONvert/conVERT

[Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD DSc(hon) @PeterHotez]

8/n: Exactly why the increasing zoonotic spillovers and rising arthropod borne illnesses is open to conjecture but I believe it's climate change pushing animal reservoirs to explore new habitats, together with deforestation and urbanization. It's animals and vectors closer to humans and people coming closer to animals and vectors

[Dr Jane @JaneEOpie]

@disco___cat Don't give Mike any air space