gulnaz begum

Glial biologist and Astrocyte enthusiast. # University of Pittsburgh studying the role of glia in stroke and AD.

[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.

[Suryansh Tiwari @Suryanshti777]

A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT.

He knows his time is running out.

So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour.

He died 5 months later.

This is that lecture.

The most important hour you'll watch this week. 👇
Bookmark it for later

[Prof. Michael Lin @MichaelLinLab]

Today I'd like to honor the memory of my mentor and friend, Roger Tsien, born 1952 February 1. Today would have been Roger's 74th birthday.

Most know Roger for his 2008 Chemistry Nobel Prize with Shimomura and Chalfie. Roger made GFP into the versatile imaging method it is now.

[Science News @SciencNews]

Why would anyone want to be a scientist?

#PhD #PhDLife #AcademicTwitter #Science #Scientist #postdoc

[Martin Picard @MitoPsychoBio]

The brain is full of mitochondria!
But how many, and where?

Different types of mitochondria specialize for energy transformation and other functions

In MitoBrainMap v1.0 we provide the first maps of mitochondrial content and OxPhos capacity across the human brain

[Ruslan Rust @rust_ruslan]

🚨 New paper: Much of stroke research focuses on acute injury - but what changes in the brain one month after stroke?

We mapped cellular and molecular shifts in the brain during the repair phase | J Neuroinflammation @BioMedCentral 🧬🧠 👇

[John Streicher @JohnStreicher1]

It’s over RNAseq friends, the time of Proteomics has come

[gulnaz begum @astrogul]

@The_shefeeq Vitamin D is a hormone! A steroid. The effects are only transient. However the long lasting consequences of over use of D has never been studied! Look up the metabolism of D it is more complex than vitD3 and D4 supplements people are popping!

[gulnaz begum @astrogul]

@izzynchristie @wellcometrust @sheffielduni @ucl @CCMN_London @CABI_UCL @insigneo Congratulations!

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Most people are depressed.

So I turned to Harvard's 86-year study on happiness and fulfillment.

What did I find?

The Harvard Happiness Protocol for happiness and longevity:

[Shefeeq Theparambil @The_shefeeq]

Happy to share our recent review article with @astrogul and Christine Rose on pH-regulating mechanisms of astrocytes in the brain
https://t.co/SNZIPJCIjg

[Ishmail Abdus-Saboor @IshmailSaboor]

A reminder of the trajectory of Nobel Laureate Katalin Kariko. Passed over for a tenured position, grants rejected, ideas shunned and overlooked. She was just too far ahead of the curve and not savvy at playing the traditional scientific game. Now look! https://t.co/P8pkHetMd8

[Shane Liddelow 🍊 @LiddelowSA]

#GliaPapers
RESEARCH @GLIA_Journal
Luca Bordoni, …, Rune Enger @UniOslo
Deletion of aquaporin-4 improves capillary blood flow distribution in brain edema. Endfoot Ca2+ signaling in edema is increased in wildtype, but not in aquaporin-4 knockouts.
https://t.co/4qJdjGqAr0

[gulnaz begum @astrogul]

@scientistswrite Interested!

[gulnaz begum @astrogul]

@JohnStreicher1 @craigtwerner Sent you a DM. Thanks a lot for the help!

[gulnaz begum @astrogul]

@JohnStreicher1 @craigtwerner Can you please share it with me?

[gulnaz begum @astrogul]

@ADiaz_PhD Started 5 months ago! @UPMC

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

A question that every academic asks: which journal should I submit my article to?

To help academics decide, Taylor & Francis has developed an amazing tool called "Journal Suggester."

Here's how to use it 👇

[gulnaz begum @astrogul]

@Jake_Cashion_ @Hunter98785541 Thank you