Ellen Seiter

Professor of Film and Television, Retired from USC Cinema.

[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.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

Wow. The Pope was just asked his stance on migration. His answer is amazing:

“I would change the question: what is the global North doing to help the global South in its situation that forces them to migrate.”

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

Remembering this from Bertell Ollman:

“bourgeois ideology serves capitalist interests ….when it confuses people, or makes them overly pessimistic, and resigned, or makes it difficult for them to formulate criticisms or imagine an alternative system."

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

I'm starting my business! #cuttheribbon #legalzoom

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

Norman Lear was my most admired figure in US TV history. I also had the privilege of knowing him as a fellow parent at Crossroads: his sense of fairness, his kind encouragement to children not his own, and his support for teachers and staff were deeply moving to
witness.

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

Collection of vintage TV sets (40 photos) https://t.co/lMIzvtqIGJ via @pinterest

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

My son Henry (offering Macha) with Coolidge. He was movement director on this GQ shoot.

[British GQ @BritishGQ]

“I’m very, very immature. I think that has kept me from having children. Maybe if I had kids, I would’ve had to have grown up.” – @JenCoolidge.

https://t.co/37cu9C4nyZ

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

#PressingOn: Support Hong Kong Free Press - safeguard press freedom & in... https://t.co/QpWxR8O7db via @YouTube

[whit strub @whitstrub]

scenes from today's (ongoing!) @ruaaup labor action at Rutgers-Newark: grad workers, faculty, community members, Sara Nelson, Chris Smalls, & management (that's the rat)

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

my amazing student

[Raymond Ra🍥 @RaySashayAway]

New publication out at the International Journal of Korean History!🇰🇷🌈 https://t.co/Wf18q9S6Sh

This theoretical piece, focusing on the Sinchon #IDAHOBIT billboard vandalism case from 2020, attempts to re-locate queer Korean visibility politics and its cultures within…

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

@RaySashayAway @rainbowactionkr YOU ARE THE BEST!!!

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

'The frontline in our homes': Covid-19's lasting impact on Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers - Hong Kong Free Press HKFP

[Annie Berke-but call me @sayanniething.bsky.social @sayanniething]

📕 📚 ❤️❤️❤️ ⁦@ucpress⁩

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

Review of <i>Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market</i> by Ying Zhu, The New Press, 2022 https://t.co/BqVYdWzg87

[Scott Myers @GoIntoTheStory]

"Hitchcock" is generally regarded as one of the great books on filmmaking. Now you can listen to it! Hitchcock interviewed by Francois Truffaut in 1962, all 25 episodes! https://t.co/GR1NIiKnPy #movies #filmmaking #screenwriting

[Outstanding Screenplays @outscreenplays]

A bad script written is still better than an amazing one that isn’t. #screenwriting

[Ellen Seiter @eeseiter]

@labuzamovies Way to go Peter!

[Cynthia B. Meyers @AnneHummert]

Attention researchers—the BBDO materials will be available this summer for research at @Hagley_Library !

[Matthew Bruce (@mattbruce007.bsky.social) @mattbruce007]

Dr. Luis-Manuel Garcia's forthcoming publication, Together Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor, to be published by @DukePress, was acknowledged yesterday at our @LCAHM_UoB publication celebration event @artsatbham @unibirmingham. Info: https://t.co/m539bAzw0E