Cellular Song

The sort that has a favourite TR7 brochure. Draws, designs, thinks too often of B.L., Triumph & TR7

[Annie Bishop @AnnieBishop123]

We’ve come a long way baby or at least we thought we had. I found this letter in the house that I bought

[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.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Concern that pellets clean-up 'could take years'."

Remember those millions of plastic beads dumped onto Camber Sands by Southern Water last November, the stuff that contains any number of heavy metals, lead, arsenic, etc.

What's happened since, CEO gone to jail, any directors being prosecuted?

Of course not. It's the EA who's in charge.

https://t.co/9lnqQLfaAV

[Tom Slater @Tom_Slater_]

I for one am shocked that a geezer who claimed he could grow women’s breasts via hypnosis might not have been operating on the up and up

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

A very inebriated man just sat down next to me at the train station and said: “Alright, gorgeous.”

I didn’t like the look of him, so I got up and moved.

“Couldn’t get away quick enough, could you love?” he shouted after me, laughing.

Then he stood up. For a moment I thought he was going to follow me.

He didn’t - but as he staggered off in the other direction, he hollered across the station: “She needs to be f**ked up the arse, that one.”

This is the reality women are navigating - every day, often without saying a word about it.

And yet we’re told that if a man puts on a dress and calls himself Susan, any discomfort we feel about sharing intimate spaces makes us the problem.

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

One of the ways we know these men know he’s not a woman is that they’ll listen to him.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

This is why I think trying to run a global liberal news organisation is so tricky. The cultures between British and American liberal journalism are so different, with different attitudes towards objectivity and where you draw the line between fact and opinion.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

Oh dear, poor Alan Cumming feels betrayed by feminism's defence of women's rights from incursions by men - however they identify. Do these men ever hear themselves?! Do they think feminism is for them, defined on their terms?! (Rhetorical questions, I already know the answer).

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

The UK 🇬🇧 just voted in favour of the Islamic Republic of Iran's nomination to a U.N committee that shapes policy on...women's rights....terrorism prevention

The IRGC remains legal in the UK

WHAT

ARE

WE

DOING!!!

🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🤷🤷🤷😩😩😩

[Ehsan Eghbal Eslami @Ehsaneghbale]

🚨Iran: 10 Political Executions in 8 days

With the execution of January protester Ali Fahim this morning, the regime has now hanged 10 political prisoners and protesters in just over a week:
🗓️Mon (Mar 30): Mohammad Taghavi, Akbar Daneshvarkar
🗓️Tue: Babak Alipour, Pouya Ghobadi
🗓️Thu: Amir Hossein Hatami
🗓️Sat: Abolhassan Montazar, Vahid Bani-Amerian
🗓️Sun: Shahin Vahedparast, Mohammad Amin Biglari
🗓️Mon (Apr 6): Ali Fahim
#IranRevolution2026‌

[MERICA MEMED @Mericamemed]

Now this is one wild story. The amount of lawsuits coming down the pipeline with stories like this is going to be astronomical.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Again. And again, the question is why. Because corrupt autocrats stick together? The fake "conservative values" propaganda? Or simply because Putin desperately needs to keep Orbán to sabotage the EU and the Trump admin seems to do whatever Putin wants?

[Karl Turner MP @KarlTurnerMP]

I’ve been a loyal Labour MP for 16 years and have only broken the whip on jury trials. I’m disappointed to be suspended without prior discussion. I’ll always stand up for justice, my principles, and East Hull. See my statement below.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

I mean, how the hell is this even legal?

Was it part of the contract that the seller is entitled to say “screw you and the money you've paid us, we're talking these weapons for ourselves”?

[The National @ScotNational]

A record level of cancer-causing chemicals was discharged into lochs across Scotland last year, new figures have shown

[Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender]

If boys and men are excluded then women and girls can have nothing at all apparently

[Madeline Grant @Madz_Grant]

An extremely grim sight to watch Labour MPs vote to remove trial by jury because the whips told them to, after a debate in which expertise& learning were laughed at. This form of governance, the ill-intentioned leading the ill-informed, is sadly our future https://t.co/3OzEXkQBfF

[Tony Kent @TonyKent_Writes]

Look at the smirking imbeciles on the other side of this masterclass in oratory, giggling at a demonstration of an ability none of them could ever hope to possess.

This is why they dismiss and undermine the world class justice system we once had. Because it was beyond them.

[Suffragent @Suffragent_]

WTF‼️305 Labour MPs voted to end jury trials.

This means magistrates will be able to jail people for up to TWO YEARS without an automatic right to appeal.

Last year, 40% of appeals from magistrate courts were upheld because they were flawed. 🇬🇧

[Joanna Hardy-Susskind @Joanna__Hardy]

I’m old enough to remember the Labour Manifesto at page 67 when they promised ‘Labour will fast-track rape cases, with specialist courts at every Crown Court location’

THAT is what was voted for, not the restriction of jury trial for thousands of ordinary people.

What happened?