Sam Roberts 💙

Committed to curiosity. NHS Clinical psychologist (later life, neuropsychology, dementias, systemic practice). Love music & art. Views my own, inspired by many.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

NEW: The Crypto Connection. @thenerve_news brings you…Part 1 of The Harbourne Receipts.

A forensic examination of the cryptobillionaire’s donations & Nigel Farage’s crypto announcements.

And guess what? There’s a pattern. Starting with the now infamous £5m gift.

By @charlienotold & @LuciaOC_
1/

[JmRoyle #LFC #YNWA #BLM #RejoinEU @MyArrse]

Reform UK St Helens councillor, Emma Beck has been fined £180 for assault after beating a woman of 60.

[Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 @reformexposed]

Bloke that was sacked at the 11th hour by the Tories because he sent dick pics to councillors.

Standing next to the woman who gets angry when she sees black people on TV.

Standing next to the bloke who posted a whole host of creepy misogyny, homophobia and hate on his deleted and suspended accounts.

Reform UK is a circus.

[Full Fact @FullFact]

The Daily Mail has corrected a column by Boris Johnson after Full Fact got in touch.

It wrongly claimed Andy Burnham lost a Labour leadership contest to Sir Keir Starmer. In fact, Mr Starmer wasn’t a candidate either time Mr Burnham stood to be leader.
https://t.co/ARjbflSDLf

[Reform Watch @theReformwatch]

Robert Kenyon is friends with Gary Raikes on Facebook. Raikes, a former BNP and Britain First member, leads the New British Union – the modern successor to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. This is who represents Reform in Makerfield.

[John O'Connell @jdpoc]

A reminder that #Farage's undeclared £5,000,000 is his 18th such offence since becoming an MP.

And 8 such offences when he was an MEP.

Anybody else would be in jail by now.

[No Cats No Life @NoCatsNoLife_m]

The last footage from the security camera before it got destroyed.

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

I can understand this is a difficult time for my psychiatry colleagues. I am sure they all have good intentions, but it turns out that the most widely used psychiatric treatment, antidepressants, causes significant iatrogenic effects (e.g. severe withdrawal reactions, PSSD), is not very effective (at best) and does not target an underlying biological abnormality after all. Although many people still seek a psychiatric diagnosis and a medical approach, increasing numbers highlight how misleading and disabling this approach can be. Their voices are starting to be heard, and we need to work with them to provide help for people who have been harmed by psychiatric treatment, and to prevent more harm being done. Trying to shoot the messenger doesn’t help anyone.

[Omid Djalili @omid9]

Comedy palate cleanser. Robert Jenrick about to grandstand but reminded of his defection from one party to another this year is gold. The timing. First line great. Second line superb but crowd not recovered from the first to fully appreciate it 😊

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I'm trying to imagine Muslim kids chanting something similar about the Jewish or Christian faiths at a rally in London. The Prevent folks, counter-terrorism police, the entire British media would be all over the story, asking why Muslims are so extreme & brainwashing their kids.

[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.

[Sam Roberts 💙 @Roberts24Ms]

So sick of the news about the Labour leadership. Whatever your view on Starmer or Labour, it's certain that the media are in a frenzy and fuelling or creating news here. How's it going to help the stability we need in the chaos of the world right now.

[Sam Roberts 💙 @Roberts24Ms]

I'm up for recruiting a feline coworker.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A company in Mexico rescued an orange stray cat and decided to hire him.

They named him Engineer Miauricio and gave him the title of Emotional Support Director. His responsibilities are smiling at coworkers, gently meowing and walking around the office.

[Supertanskiii @supertanskiii]

If he was willing to say “Up the RA” for £87, what do you think he’d be willing to do for £5 million?

[Marina Purkiss @MarinaPurkiss]

Angela Rayner was dragged through every front page for weeks...

HMRC's verdict: NOT deliberate. NOT even careless.

Farage pockets £5 million and chooses not to declare it

So where's the wall-to-wall coverage?

Tell me this isn't a rigged game.

[Reform Party Watch @WatchReform]

This is what people voted for...fucking hell :D

Bizarre moment Reform Councillor Kieran Lay, Thorne and Moorends Ward, asks Full Council for measures to monitor UFO activity as part of reopening Doncaster Sheffield Airport.

Step 1- Work towards cutting council tax.
Step 2- Set up a panel for UAP sightings.

Couldn't make this up... #doncasterreform #reform

[Sam Roberts 💙 @Roberts24Ms]

Oops.

[Emma Volney @emmavolney]

'UKIP's here!' New Reform councillor corrected on which party he now represents. #LocalElections2026

[Marina Purkiss @MarinaPurkiss]

At what point do we stop pretending our newspapers are ‘news’ and start calling them what they are…

Promotional pamphlets for the billionaires who own them and the agendas they’re selling.

[Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙 @JujuliaGrace]

Are we pretending that they did this unaided?

[Matthew Stadlen @MatthewStadlen]

An estimated 74% of voters who bothered to turn out in the local elections yesterday did NOT vote for Reform. Let that sink in. And then adjust your hyperbole accordingly.