Laura Page

English as a New Language teacher with Frontier Central Schools

[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.

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

Dear America: keep filming ICE.

The only way to *stop* secret police is to *expose* them.

Document everything — peacefully & lawfully — in honor of Alex.

[Buffalo Bills @BuffaloBills]

Thank you, Coach. ❤️💙

[Hänsel @UberHansen]

After 24 hours here's where I am at with the dismissal of Sean McDermott.

He was far from perfect but he was an exceptional leader of men. And more often than not squeezed more talent out of players than any other coach had.

Yet moving on from him after no Super Bowl appearances in 9 seasons is OK.

It's OK assuming QB1 had a say and the #Bills earnestly evaluated him and the possibilities that he could get this team over the hump.

What is not OK is promoting the GM who ultimately provided said coach with a foundation of marble and a pile of Play-Doh and said "replicate the statue of David".

Brandon Beane has been an OK GM that has been able to find decent talent in the draft and free agency BUT has been unable to add enough blue-chip players to this roster.

Josh Allen won MVP in 2024 in large part because "he didn't have any help" and the fact that Beane, through his agent and the media, is now pedaling propaganda that the team is full of talent is a slap in the face of earnest analysis.

Get rid of McDermott and that's OK. But the narratives we are clearly seeing pushed by the GM reek of a person who is willing to stab someone else in the back in order to save his own skin.

That's a problem today, and that's going to be a problem tomorrow.

[Marcus Mosher @Marcus_Mosher]

Brandon Beane

[Josh Hermsmeyer @friscojosh]

Brandon Baenlish

[nick wright @getnickwright]

Bills & Josh earned every last bit of that.

That’s a phenomenal, gutsy win against a really good Jags team.

The Bills are going to the Super Bowl for the first time since 1993.

[Laura Page @LauraPageENL]

PSA Karen: Your mom will mind if you hop on a train to the North Pole with a random snowman. And you certainly won’t be home for supper.

[Goodberry Variant @BuffOnTheBrain]

Feeling festive, so here’s Josh Allen “Dashing Through the Snow” 🛷

[Bruce Nolan @BruceExclusive]

Everybody starves.

[Benjamin Solak @BenjaminSolak]

Bills have one thing working for them on offense and simply refuse to do it three plays in a row

[Laura Page @LauraPageENL]

@BillsChatPod Same!!

[. @EndGameThor_ETH]

So, I did something brand new last week—I was on a podcast, “Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud” and had a great time talking about supporting new, untenured teachers and about how to #reclaimcommunity
@AFTunion @nysut @routledgebooks
https://t.co/Cuubh1Bkei

[. @EndGameThor_ETH]

Bell to bell cell phone ban could give us the leverage to move the needle on a giant social problem. https://t.co/ZOfS6sIuCN @nysut @NYSUTWNY @AFTunion @NBPTS @middleweb #cellphones #belltobellban

[Mike Golic Jr @mikegolicjr]

the Bills OL is a freaking buzzsaw.

[Kevin Clark @bykevinclark]

I asked @MitchSchwartz71 who the most valuable offensive lineman is in 2024. Last year he said Jason Kelce, with Kelce gone, his answer was DION DAWKINS.

Mitchell goes deep with high praise for the Bills and @DDawkins66.

This Is Football was excellent today.

[Dion Dawkins @DDawkins66]

If we get this retweet to more then 5k retweets I’ll send a lucky fan a pro bowl Jersey #ProBowlVote #DionDawkins

[WNY Athletics @WNYAthletics]

Frontier Crowned the A Division Sectional Champions

Interviews with Coach Renee Kumiega and Lauren Mis

Brought to you by WNY Immediate Care, New York Army National Guard, Pure Water, & William Mattar

[Molly McKew @MollyMcKew]

If you compare benefits for all Americans — but especially American women + mothers — with those of nations of comparable wealth, you will die laughing at how little we have been mindf*cked into expecting

[Laura Page @LauraPageENL]

@UberHansen #gobills