Vctr

Three word sentences. Brain to arms to hands to fingers to keyboard.

[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.

[Vctr @iamvictor]

Disneyland’s Most Preventable Tragedy https://t.co/C4ZDHW2DLI

[Vctr @iamvictor]

Exposing Why Farmers Can't Legally Replant Their Own Seeds https://t.co/D9CxXGbRYP

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

The narrative about China's "debt-trap diplomacy" in Africa is complete bullshit.

A study that looked at more than 1,000 loans to Africa found that Chinese lenders never seized assets, never used courts to enforce payments, and never applied penalty interest rates.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

A new study published in the Lancet finds that life expectancy in Gaza dropped by nearly half, from 75.5 years to 40.6 years, during the first twelve months of the genocide. Apocalyptic. Link below.

[Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention @LemkinInstitute]

Your attack on UN special Rapporteur Albanese @FranceskAlbs is so clearly intended to hide your criminal complicity in an ongoing genocide that you truly should be embarrassed. Is there any trick from the genocidaire’s playbook that you will refuse to carry out? By attacking a person who is courageously speaking truth, you obviously hope to draw attention away from the criminal conspiracy that is the Biden White House, State Department, Department of Defense, and your office, all of which have materially aided Israel in committing genocide. Francesca Albanese is an upstander. She will be remembered as a hero. You will be remembered as a perpetrator and an apologist. As experts on the crime of genocide, we can say this with certainty.

[UNIFIL @UNIFIL_]

On 22 October, peacekeepers on duty at a permanent observation post near Dhayra were observing IDF soldiers conducting house clearing operations nearby. Upon realizing they were being observed, the IDF soldiers fired at the post. The duty guards withdrew to avoid being shot.

[United Nations Geneva @UNGeneva]

"#Gaza is the real-world embodiment of hell on earth for its one million children. And it’s getting worse, day by day, as we see the horrific impact of the daily airstrikes and military operations on Palestinian children." - @1jameselder, @UNICEF

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

not the onion

[Sky News @SkyNews]

At least 28 on-duty medics have been killed in the past 24 hours in Lebanon, according to the WHO.

Sky's @AlexCrawfordSky is on the ground in Beirut where rescue workers say they are falling victim to Israeli airstrikes.

Read more: https://t.co/DrCbVoNYJ9

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

BREAKING: 99 US physicians and medical professionals have published a letter and report indicating "probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza... is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population."

This is genocide. https://t.co/xdeogIbFz4

[Hümeyra Pamuk @humeyra_pamuk]

SCOOP: I reviewed three sets of internal email exchanges between senior Biden administration officials who were warned just DAYS after Oct. 7 that Israel was risking committing war crimes by ordering more than a million Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate. There’s more: 1/X

[Brett Murphy @BrettMmurphy]

Leaked docs: While Gaza starved, USAID and State's refugees bureau came to a legally explosive conclusion — Israel had deliberately prevented food & medicine from getting in

But Blinken told congress the exact opposite, so the arms could keep flowing. https://t.co/htCXXLalxL

[Chay Bowes @BowesChay]

Strange how the Chinese Media seem to have no problems understanding what seems indecipherable by British, US, and EU Client Media. @SCMPNews

[TIME @TIME]

"The Israeli army called my shooting an 'accident,' claiming the soldiers fired live rounds into the air ... The truth is they fired straight at me."

Column: I'm an American activist. Israeli forces shot me at a peaceful protest in the West Bank https://t.co/QiT5Lz1Bnh

[Kerry Burgess @KerryBurgess]

I think the German people get this. The problem is the German government..

[COMBATE |🇵🇷 @upholdreality]

🇲🇾 Malaysia Prime Minister in Russia: "This did not begin in October 7. It began with colonization & the Nakba in 1948... It doesn't stop because of Israel's intransigence with the total support of the US... It's time that Palestinians are treated as human beings, not as slaves"

[Sky News @SkyNews]

ICJ rules Israel settlement policy in occupied Palestinian territories in breach of international law

Read more🔗
https://t.co/jjOyk34V6p

[Oxfam International Media Team @newsfromoxfam]

🚨BREAKING: A new Oxfam report reveals how Israel's systematic weaponizing of water against Palestinians in #Gaza, has reduced the amount of water available in Gaza by 94% to 4.74 litres a day per person.

Read our release👉 https://t.co/BYn8GDKOil

[Vctr @iamvictor]

Israeli weapons packed with shrapnel causing devastating injuries to children in Gaza, doctors say | Palestinian territories | The Guardian https://t.co/YtMoorREeU