Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Pharmacy teaching technician @UniofReading, PhD, AFHEA and a drug dealer. Fan of tableting, drug delivery, AI, Inca khipu and chess. All views are my own

[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.

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

Studies show that watching a beaver eat cabbage lowers stress by 17% 🦫

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

@VBkramnik @chesscom У многих стримеров чат на ютубе до сих пор открыт во время ТТ (Жигалко, к примеру), но сейчас в меню Шиманов :)

[Chemist+Druggist @ChemistDruggist]

BREAKING: GPs vote in favour of ‘immediate’ end to pharmacy blood pressure checks

https://t.co/ZY9dQJYc9r

#GP leaders have voted "overwhelmingly" for #pharmacy blood pressure checks to be “terminated with immediate effect” at @TheBMA’s annual GP conference

[GPhC @TheGPhC]

We have launched our Carbon Net Zero Action Plan, aiming to achieve carbon net zero by 2040. This plan outlines our commitment to sustainable pharmacy regulation and acknowledges climate change as the most significant threat to public health. Read more >> https://t.co/aN4wBZNm9P

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

This August I'm challenging myself to walk 100 miles to raise money to support people with cancer. I'd be so grateful for your support, anything you can donate really will help to make a difference.
https://t.co/IZKcAdW6Js    
https://t.co/4skEZC2OVf    (Facebook)

[New Scientist @newscientist]

A computer virus can use ChatGPT to rewrite its code to avoid detection, then write tailored emails that look like genuine replies, spreading itself in an email attachment. https://t.co/8MvsD2nsxZ

[nature @Nature]

Eye diseases long thought to be purely genetic might be caused in part by bacteria that escape the gut and travel to the retina https://t.co/7dM1rGdEUc

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

A "cognitive bias" is a systematic error in thinking that ruins decision-making.

The 12 most powerful cognitive biases I've found:

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

For the first time in my life, my co-author is a robot, but it is more intelligent than me 😂. Thanks ChatGPT 🙏.
"Assessing ChatGPT's use of person-first language in healthcare conversations" https://t.co/1YQ9V9j0iu
#ChatGPT
@RSofPharmacy @UniRdg_TechServ @technicians_mih

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

"Using social media as a medical professional": @gmcuk guidance published on 4.12.2023, will come into effect on 30 January 2024.
https://t.co/q04UsNS1lS

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

Bad news for work-from-home: "Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas" (Nature 2023, v. 623). Disruptive science is more likely to come from groups working in close collaboration. Remote teams are less likely to produce new, disruptive ideas.
https://t.co/PYZT8Y5TWV

[Harvard Medical School @harvardmed]

Research shows that students learn better in diverse working groups and that patients have better health outcomes when care providers represent the diversity of the communities they serve. https://t.co/BPPzYMnLO6

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

The Complex Excipients Expert Committee intends to revise the US Pharmacopeia "Polyethylene Glycol" monograph by including a limit of Ethylene Glycol and Diethylene Glycol (EG/DEG) tests to address the risk of EG/DEG contamination in Polyethylene Glycol.
https://t.co/VCsYdZ05s1

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

Distribution of Female and Male First and Last Authorship across Drug Delivery Related Journals with Respect to Year and Journal Impact Factor. A strong negative correlation with female authorship was observed with respect to journal impact factor.
https://t.co/HYpnR7Iiw6

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

Disposal of Laboratory Waste refresher training - now I know more about the offensive waste, probably the only type of waste we don't collect (don't want to offense😜) @UniRdg_TechServ @technicians_mih

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

@ggkuhnle "mit dem Bambusstock" - no plastic, can be reusable, sustainable approach :)

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

Can AI question witnesses/suspects?

[New Scientist @newscientist]

AI creates pictures of what people are seeing by analysing brain scans https://t.co/AogH0caVHi

[Ellen Hackl 🇺🇦🇦🇹🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @hackl_ellen]

Well, I also could not resist checking my https://t.co/blhCCkLW2I profile... Not 100%, no pretty accurate :). Especially I like "knowledgeable and engaged in their field" 😇 with interest in
criminology 😎 #15minutesoffame

[VeryBritishProblems @SoVeryBritish]

A quick British translation guide:

Meanings of "we'll see"
1. No

Meanings of "maybe"
1. No

Meanings of “could do”
1. No

Meanings of “I’ll think about it”
1. No

Meanings of “let’s talk about it later”
1. No

Meanings of “I’ll see how I feel”
1. No