Collision Industry Advocate, Consultant, Writer, Former Multi-shop Owner. Love ballet, skiing, horses, architecture, craftsmanship, and great health outcomes!
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.
We figured out that dad has a psych med induced neurological injury, and has been suffering from akathisia. It’s been 6 years since any psych medications. Last summer his symptoms started, after a flare up likely induced by mold (CIRS) and stress. It was complicated by pneumonia and associated sepsis a month later. It’s been horrible. Neurological injuries from psych meds are far more common than people know. I made this video to explain what they are and what akathisia is because they’re not talked about enough, they’re misdiagnosed, nearly impossible to treat, and hidden by the pharmaceutical industry. I don’t plan on making another update about my dad, it stresses my family out, and myself, and there’s nothing more to say about it until things get better. I will be jumping up and down about psych med injury awareness from now on as it’s impacted my health as well, and is devastating. Prayers are appreciated still.
There is no reasonable excuse for our dire student success rates except for who is at the helm. Corporate Activity Tax has brought in billions since 2021 solely for Student Success!! And my niece says next year Civics class will be wholly online at Sandy HS. WTF.
There is no reasonable excuse for our dire student success rates except for who is at the helm. Corporate Activity Tax has brought in billions since 2021 solely for Student Success!! And my niece says next year Civics class will be wholly online at Sandy HS. WTF.
Oregon students deserve the time in the classroom they need to succeed. That’s why I signed an executive order to protect and strengthen instructional time across our schools.
Democrats blaming Trump for $5.30 gas in Oregon are being hypocritical. Oregon already hits us with high income taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, & a range of “sin” taxes & local fees with Dems pushing for more. Yet, their tax‑and-spend agenda is pushing Oregonians over the edge.
A Columbia County resident sent this picture to me after filling up his truck in St. Helens, where gas is up to $5.30 a gallon and on the rise. This is NOT normal. Trump's chaotic policies are hurting Oregonians and Americans.
And another one!
Portland City Council, how may more are you gonna let fade away?
You did this to north Portland - Mississippi cooridor- in the late 70s and early 80s - cost my family a ton.
Could this be Democrat Demolition Derby?
https://t.co/zwyO5TgyYe
@Safety1st manufacturer of magnetic cabinet locks has a locked profile. Ironic?
They have reduced the power of the magnet calling it an upgrade! My experience with the current “upgrade” is inconsistency in adequate performance - a definite downgrade!
Consumer-owned utilities including electric co-ops ran ads in major newspapers across Oregon yesterday calling out Gov Tina Kotek for undermining hydro power and hiking utility rates while claiming focus on “affordability.” These are not right-leaning or political outfits.
I promised Oregonians I wouldn’t back down from a fight to safeguard Oregon values. Making sure every child has the opportunity to meet their future promise with a strong public education is one of our most fundamental responsibilities and one of my top priorities as Governor.
Portland wants to nickle & dime every household with streaming service(s).
“We have a robust legal department of really skilled attorneys … fighting lawsuits every day. The city gets sued hundreds of times every year. One additional lawsuit … would not be particularly bad …”
A Portland business is expanding a recall over possible broken glass to nearly 37 million pounds of its frozen chicken food products.
The products are under the Ajinomoto brand, as well as Kroger (Fred Meyer), Ling Ling, Tai Pei and Trader Joe’s branding. https://t.co/pd5PQ1EJVS
Oregon, Portland, Tri-county areas are, and have been for decades, under the leadership control of Democrats and Socialists.
MO: Policy changes, higher fees and taxes.
It’s not going well.
Remember this when it’s time to vote!
https://t.co/HiQh0UjFC1
It might be the caffeine speaking, but I love you all ❤️
Happy Valentine's day you sexy mf'ers.
I'm writing this at a coffeeshop. Rain outside. A first date happening next to me, I'm hoping they make it.
I'm feeling happy & grateful for all of this, human civilization, life on Earth, a spinning rock in space. There are 100-400 billion other planets in our galaxy alone. And there are ~2 trillion galaxies in just the observable universe.
And somehow we have a chance to crack open the mysteries of the universe, to solve physics, biology, intelligence, to understand our own mind, to travel out toward the stars.
And at the same time, we often bicker about the stupidest shit. The whole thing is hilarious and beautiful.
All of this is a miracle ❤️
PS: It's definitely the caffeine speaking 🤣