Thomas Cavanagh

Freelance trainer (Lantra), assessor and lecturer. Happy to take your money.

[peaklass @peaklass1]

Oh, May. Every year I count down the weeks until your arrival, and then you pass in the blink of an eye. Here’s a look back at the beauty of May through my lens. Please follow my account if you’d like more. No politics, no AI, just countryside beauty.

📍 Peak District, England

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@clark_aviation It was a gateway drug to more serious rc flying.

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

Now, this is interesting.

[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.

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@mitchellsnik Root cause is contractors on minimum wage.

[The Sooty Show @Sootyandco]

May the sausages be with you.

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@PulpLibrarian To be honest, I thought it had closed long ago.

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@AuthorityApe @NiohBerg If I remember correctly, the US did not come running to help us in the 80s

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@nashienet @CameronYardeJnr That had me worried for a second

[🇬🇧📺 Classic British TV 📺🇬🇧 @Classicbritcom]

Worst film I've ever seen. Sid James
wasn't even in it.

[Spaceballs The X Account @Grunt2A]

Now that Artemis II has launched we have 10 days to get everyone on Earth a Planet of the Apes costume so we can do something hilarious when the astronauts return 😁

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

https://t.co/0eLbq8v9Ie

Will fuel prices fall as quickly as they went. What are the odds?

[funf.studio @radartabs]

'Lest we Forget' - the Tories cut the fleet from 42 major RN ships to 25 in 2010....

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@MissionArtist I remember some time ago, when entering the US, travelers had to declare if they were members of the Nazi party.

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@0xD4rkM0n3y Locked in bro! 🔒

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@0xDystonix Something special is building

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@mintscr1be Let’s build together

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@tokenlabyrinth We’re dialed in

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

@tx_fugitive Strong signal here

[Thomas Cavanagh @fuzzybloke]

The new Met Office forecast app is terrible @metoffice. Not only a very busy site, but the weather map is hard to see your own location. Also, the adverts are showing womens bra and panties, not my buying priority.