Asim K. Halder, PhD

Assistant Professor at Xiangnan University | 2026 Terry Todd Awardee @UTAustin | SUS PhD Alum & President’s Scholar | Mandarin Speaker (HSK 4)

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

Honored to win the Terry Todd Award from @thestarkcenter @UTAustin 🏆 for our paper "Training the Body, Healing the Self: The Martial and Medicinal Epistemology of Kalaripayattu".

Grateful to the community recognizing South Asia’s embodied traditions.

https://t.co/tzKxOz2MN5

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

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.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Buying a fancy car is not a sign of a midlife crisis. It’s a mark of relationship insecurity.

6 studies: When men and women have attachment anxiety, they seek status symbols to compensate and stand out among their peers.

Belonging and connection are antidotes to materialism.

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

@BoriaMajumdar Congrats to you and the co-authors! Looking forward to reading it.

[Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research (CMCR) @cmcr_ucsd]

📆 Save the date! The 2026 CMCR Symposium: Cannabis & Sport is Oct 1–2 (virtual) 🧠🏃‍♂️ Join leading scientists as we explore cannabis, cannabinoids, performance, pain, and recovery. Registration is free—secure your spot now: https://t.co/X5oefML3MG
#MedicalCannabis #CannabisResearch #CannabisEducation #CMCRSymposium

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

Thrilled to share that I’ve received an invitation from Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) to review the book "Sport in Contemporary India: Society, Culture and Governance." Looking forward to diving into this brilliant text! 📚🕵️

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

That's really fascinating! @RafNicholson I'm looking forward to reading this. https://t.co/AaM5FCEosZ

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

🌍 More Global Storefronts:

🇳🇱 NL: https://t.co/p6qLNGAo9r
🇩🇪 DE: https://t.co/JomqFmela2
🇫🇷 FR: https://t.co/zg8htm56Wc
🇮���� IT: https://t.co/4Rs4Agofmd
🇧🇷 BR: https://t.co/6brqy0jW2E
🇲🇽 MX: https://t.co/Y1SIeJtPf2

(3/3) #AcademicTwitter #PhDLife

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

☕ IT'S LIVE! ☕

A PhD thesis is built in the quiet hours, fueled by curiosity and caffeine. Having crossed that finish line, I wrote this survival manual of 22 comforting recipes for every scholar on that grueling path. 🎓

🇺🇸 US/Global: https://t.co/0mTFSVMMbs

(1/3) 👇

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

🌍 Global Purchase Links:

🇬🇧 UK: https://t.co/nyVEzRzb5h
🇮🇳 IN: https://t.co/LwMum2NTs4
🇨🇦 CA: https://t.co/tF3MhLRCfv
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🇯🇵 JP: https://t.co/ISeQMS2NM3
🇪🇸 ES: https://t.co/0gCGAGNaWd

(2/3) 👇

[Science News @SciencNews]

Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

For many years we knew humans have an internal, biological clock that helps them anticipate and adapt to the regular rhythm of the day. But how does this clock actually work?

Laureates Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young found out how: https://t.co/OTjnfitsEC

[Science News @SciencNews]

How to write an excellent Review article
#PhD #phdlife #postdoc #Science #academia

[Top Biomedical Science @imedverse]

🎯Just Accepted

What you may want to know:

❓Coffee and tea consumption and chronic disease

@HarvardHealth @Harvard @harvardmed @HarvardChanSPH

#Nutrition #Meded #Medx #Coffee #Tea #Science #Health #Academic #PhD #PrecisionNutrition

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

Definitely!

[Science News @SciencNews]

Scientists should get paid for thinking time @Nature

#PhD #PhDlife #academics #AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter #Postdocs #Research #Science

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

More today on exercising fathers and metabolic health of offspring, summarized https://t.co/BMIvUaRjvD

[Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman]

Forbes just released its latest annual ranking of global billionaires.

The pace at which extreme wealth is rising is simply staggering:

The wealth of global billionaires now reaches the equivalent of 17% of world GDP. 🧵

[Garett Jones @GarettJones]

True

[Marc Porter Magee 🎓 @marcportermagee]

“Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence … The effect of 1 additional year of education … was estimated at approximately 1 to 5 standardized IQ points.”

[Itai Yanai @ItaiYanai]

The 3 hardest things to learn as a scientist:
1. Trust the data.. especially when it’s not what you expected,
2. Trust the data.. allowing it to change your direction,
3. Trust the data.. but not too much: test with new data at every turn.

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

@sohinichat thank you :)

[Asim K. Halder, PhD @AsimKHalder]

Honored to win the Terry Todd Award from @thestarkcenter @UTAustin 🏆 for our paper "Training the Body, Healing the Self: The Martial and Medicinal Epistemology of Kalaripayattu".

Grateful to the community recognizing South Asia’s embodied traditions.

https://t.co/tzKxOz2MN5