Robert Young

I am a father of 2 who finds time to teach between watching sports.

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

@bet365 Spain
Kane

[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.

[The Footy Section @FTBLsection]

Crazy 🤯

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

@dressCodeHQ Thanks for doing this, had classes on it since Monday and they love it.

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

@spotify any reason family premium is 4 times the price in the UK compared to the US

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

@spotify would love you to explain why premium family is 4 times more expensive in the UK compared to the US. Complete and utter nonsense

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

Anyone know what time @JamieWebster94 is on tonight in Dundee? Currently stuck on the motorway for to an accident

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

Would love to now why so many of these @NFL games are so empty at the end of tight games. Feels very strange

[Ari Meirov @MySportsUpdate]

Nebraska HC Matt Rhule took 3 minutes today to talk about mental health following the tragic death of #Cowboys DE Marshawn Kneeland:

“Our generation of kids — my kids — they all just say, ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’m straight.’ You really gotta unearth it. … That young man scored a TD just a couple days ago, and to the outside world you’d think he’s at the pinnacle. But he was dealing with something — I don’t know what it was. But I pray for him, him and his family.”

Watch this in full... Incredible message:

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

NFL predictions 5/5

Final Four
NFC
Packers v Eagles
AFC
Bills v Chiefs

Superbowl
Packers v Bills

Winner
Packers

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

NFL predictions 4/5
NFC South
Buccaneers 13-4
Falcons 9-8
Panthers 4-13
Saints 2-15

AFC South
Texans 14-3
Jaguars 6-11
Titans 3-14
Colts 2-15

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

NFL predictions 3/5
NFC West
49ers 12-5
Seahawks 11-6
Rams 10-7
Cardinals 8-9

AFC West
Chiefs 15-2
Raiders 12-5
Broncos 9-8
Chargers 7-10

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

NFL predictions 2/5
NFC North
Packers 14-3
Lions 12-5
Vikings 6-11
Bears 3-14

AFC North
Ravens 14-3
Bengals 13-4
Steelers 7-10
Browns 2-15

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

NFL predictions 1/5
NFC East
Eagles 14-3
Commanders 11-6
Cowboys 7-11
Giants 0-17

AFC East
Bills 14-3
Patriots 6-11
Jets 5-12
Dolphins 5-12

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

Only watched ten minutes or so of the Falkirk v Dundee Utd game, so many players falling over. Just how bad is the surface at Falkirk.

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

@BBCMOTD One of the worse decisions I've ever seen on a football pitch.

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

@LauraPlants_ You'll be great and don't worry it gets easier

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

@SkySportsNews The 6 second rule was in place when he was a ref and he ignored it just like every other ref. Why will this rule be any different?

[Robert Young @Winaukee]

@zanetalkssports Worse player on the pitch, will be gone in the summer

[dressCode @dressCodeHQ]

🎄Our annual Christmas Cyber Advent Calendar is now open! Open to all Primary and Secondary pupils. Prizes up for grabs 🎁

More details at https://t.co/KaXSK1OKo2

#ChooseComputingScience #caschat #edutwitter