THE neuroSCIENTIST

Neurocientífico, profesor, divulgador, diseñador (en formación), ojeras y depresión 24/7 No somos el journal científico 👨🏻‍🔬🧠🏳️‍🌈

[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.

[Nature Metabolism @NatMetabolism]

#Throwback

REVIEW | JP Bolaños & PJ Magistretti

The neuron–astrocyte metabolic unit as a cornerstone of brain energy metabolism in health and disease
https://t.co/faUCTEfapj

[Chao Sun @LukeChaoSun]

We are recruiting 1-2 fully funded Postdoc in 2026 to join my lab ⁦⁦@dandrite⁩ ⁦@NordicEMBL⁩ ⁦@AarhusUni_int⁩. If you are interested in how brain synapses work, shoot me an email! https://t.co/5R5p42U5Zy

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Neurociencia=Neurona+Astocito

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

¿Recuerdas cuándo te uniste a X? ¡Yo sí! #MiAniversarioDeX

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Entonces me dio hiperfoco y puse a correr 12 geles de Western blot

🫠 Esto está muy extremo, Pecas, por qué soy así?

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

🔬Lo bueno es que, hay muchas maneras de obtener neuronas verdes, ¿les gustaría saber más?

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

💚GFP es una proteína que brilla de color verde cuando se estimula con luz de la longitud de onda adecuada, de hecho GFP significa proteína verde fluorescente y es una herramienta muy utilizada en los laboratorios de neurociencias para ver la estructura de las neuronas.

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Ese ADN se le dan a las neuronas que queremos que sean verdes, la neurona toma el ADN y produce la proteína... pero darle el ADN a la neurona, que lo tome y lo lea (a ese proceso se le llama transfección) no siempre sale 😩

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Nos vemos en San Diego para el #SfN de este año

#SfN2025 #SfN25

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Aún está en fase preclínica, todavía falta un tiempo para que se pruebe en humanos, donde debe pasar por 3 fases al menos antes de que pueda comercializarse, quizás un par de años más, estaremos al pendiente.

THE neuroSCIENTIST🧠

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Se ha desarrollado un nuevo fármaco para tratar el dolor, se llama SBI-810, y aunque está en fase de investigación, ha probado ser útil para aliviar el dolor en diversos modelos de dolor en ratones de laboratorio, como el dolor inflamatorio, neuropático y postoperatorio.

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Su uso remodela la forma en que sentimos el dolor, disminuyendo mediadores que le dan forma, como canales de sodio y la transmisión excitadora.

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Ponte pilas!!!

Nuestras neuronas producen electricidad, les dejo la info en la imagen. Cuando estos mecanismos se alteran, pueden producirse enfermedades como la epilepsia, que se caracteriza por una gran cantidad de actividad eléctrica fuera de control.

🧑‍🔬THE neuroSCIENTIST🧠

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

Neurodanonino... las neurotrofinas son proteínas que promueven, entre otras cosas, el crecimiento celular, siendo centrales durante el desarrollo del sistema nervioso, por lo que se han implicado en trastornos como el autismo.

@Danone patrocíname jajaja

[The Struggling Scientists @TheStrugglingS4]

Maybe in my 40s I can say the paper was accepted 🙈

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

@Cachorromoreli3 Feliz año nuevo 🎉㊗️ 🎆

[THE neuroSCIENTIST @THEneuroSC]

@Cachorromoreli3 Buenos días

[Tanentzapf Lab @TanentzapfLab]

My 3 favourite things about being a scientist: your full time job is to solve mysteries (how cool is that!), constantly being amazed by how beautiful & surprising the natural world is, getting to work with people who are smarter than you & have skills you only dream of having.