Qualified teacher with an avid love of textiles and papercrafts. Novel and 'tried and trusted' techniques employed for workshops, demos and unique products.
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.
Our public services aren’t for a secretive profit-hungry US tech firm. Sign the petition to tell the Government to scrap all contracts with secretive US tech firm Palantir. https://t.co/wAfPhxZEiN via @38degrees
A crypto investor just donated £9 million to the Reform Party. Right now, billionaires can pour unlimited money into our elections, effectively buying our democracy. Think that's wrong? Add your name to call for a cap on donations today: https://t.co/u1XXn0U4ZJ via @38degrees
@peterborough_cathedr I will be there signing my new book Click! Lands End to John O'Groats. Plus 7 other books.
Spectacular #Christmas Market.130 stalls, 14 Nov 1-8 Sat 15, 10-5. Sun 16, 12-4. Part proceeds from all my books goto Breast Cancer Research
https://t.co/AizlOqgkLE
🚨Boris Johnson’s secret cash grabs exposed. An official watchdog confirms he broke the rules with his shady deals, but he’s still pocketing £115,000 of OUR money every year. Sign the petition to suspend his ex-PM allowance: https://t.co/gMQvPvjcFF
Trump and his tech CEOs are trying to make our government SLASH their tax. But @TaxJusticeUK has shown that cash could train 100,000+ NHS nurses! If you want our government to stand strong and say no, join me and sign the petition: https://t.co/P4iK8GrG6K
Should the world’s richest man, Elon Musk have a slice of the UK energy market? I don’t think so, which is why I added my name to the petition to @ofgem demanding they reject Tesla's application to supply energy in the UK. Join me and add your name too? https://t.co/1vrLsI5Fe7
Want to retire into your 70s? A Government review of the state pension age could see all of us forced to work longer. They're targeting ordinary people to plug funding gaps, instead of the mega-rich. I've signed the petition against these plans, will you? https://t.co/ZqtV0bH8Cj
We need to rewild 30% of the planet to restore nature & protect our wildlife, but Britain is falling behind. So I've signed this new petition calling on one of our biggest landowners - the Church of England - to rewild its land. Join me? https://t.co/H56iEVfaXI via @38degrees
🌳 Dame Judi Dench is calling for the return of ancient woodlands. Will you sign the petition to help restore the Ghost Woods and protect our green spaces for future generations? https://t.co/AgzvUjZgxB via @38degrees
Thames Water wants to block campaigners from speaking out against them?! Enough is enough. The Government must renationalise this failing water company. Agree? Sign the petition today: https://t.co/GOu0fseaRB
NDAs can silence victims of abuse & harassment. Let's change this! Sign the petition to ensure the Employment Rights Bill bans NDAs in cases of misconduct. #StopAbusiveNDAs#EmploymentRightsBill https://t.co/4yinPDe0fe via @38degrees
We need to rewild 30% of the planet to restore nature & protect our wildlife, but Britain is falling behind. So I've signed this new petition calling on one of our biggest landowners - the Church of England - to rewild its land. Join me? https://t.co/H56iEVfaXI via @38degrees
The Government needs to bring in legislation to compensate the thousands of WASPI women affected by the increase in the Women’s State Pension Age. Will you sign the petition? https://t.co/vtxWRxhSUm
@TobyWoody It’s only Joe Blogs that needs planning permission in Peterborough. The council didn’t bother with it for the huge 5G masts that suddenly appeared throughout the city and MPs are doing nothing about it even though the issue has been raised! 😠
I'm backing @BreastCancerNow's call for a national breast screening awareness campaign. More women screened means more lives saved from breast cancer. Will you join me? #NoTimeToWaste https://t.co/twfL8et2vV