Jane Longhurst

Actor, voice artist, MC, fmr broadcaster ABC radio, Saints tragic, cricket and RU fan. Views mine.

[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.

[Mark Kenny @markgkenny.bsky.social @markgkenny]

Read this. Beautiful piece.

[Stephen G. Rae @BardCumberland]

A single 400-year-old ancient oak produces 234,000 litres of oxygen a year while soaking up carbon dioxide, and can support more than 2,000 species of bird, insect, fungus, and lichen.

📍my favourite oak #lakedistrict

[Jenny Difficult-Frecklington-Jones 🇵🇸🍉🇮🇷 @JonesHowDareYou]

Pauline passing the pub test.
— Matt Golding

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Most of you will never have had:
Measles
Mumps
Rubella
Tetanus
Diphtheria
Polio

And none of you will ever have had Smallpox

Why?

Because vaccines work

[Quentin Dempster @QuentinDempster]

C’mon @AlboMP Attorney General @mrowland please urgently adopt Denmark’s new Copyright laws giving all citizens ownership of their biometric data (facial/voice/finger prints/morphology). Scammers, AI, Trump, global platforms cannot use your biometrics without permission. 👇👇

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

Sir David Attenborough turns 100 next week.

"Please make no mistake. Climate change is the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced."

[stranger @strangerous10]

Dr Richard Denniss dismantles the gas industry’s favorite threat.
If taxes kill investment, why is the gas industry rushing to Norway to pay 78%? 🙄
“They are playing us for fools.” 🔥
Nationals’ Susan McDonald has no rebuttal & scrambles to change the subject. #auspol

[Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd]

The penny will drop soon. There will be mass panic and the media will be fighting to say they weren’t warned how bad it was. They were. Like here:

[Mike Hudema @MikeHudema]

“If the bees disappear off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

#SaveTheBees #ActOnClimate #climateemergency #Climate #nature #GreenNewDeal #biodiversity

[Alex Hale 🌒 @NBPTROCKS]

Loss of birds.
Loss of life.
Industrial greed.

[Glen Schaefer @hardenuppete]

@MikeCarlton01 Might be time for everyone to revisit the great work @crikey_news and @d_hardaker did investigating the political influence of right wing US based Pentecostal Christian groups.

https://t.co/vbizi5Df7k

[GO GREEN @ECOWARRIORSS]

Terminating life on Earth- we will never see them again
10,443 species of animal, plant and fungi found on Earth are so close to the brink of extinction that they are classified as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Of those, 223 are birds

https://t.co/GHq8IRC1ez

[Valerie Anne Smith @ValerieAnne1970]

“Did you know over 50% of the Bees in the World died last year?”

“Bees are responsible for one third of our Food Sources.”

“It’s not an accident...it’s a Bee Genocide.”

This subject receives nowhere near enough attention & by the time it does, it may well be too late.

[Jerome Foster II @JeromeFosterII]

British scientists have confirmed that the collapse of Antarctic sea ice is turning penguins’ annual moult deadly. During moulting they temporarily cannot swim. If ice disappears before their feathers grow back, they are stranded. A fall from 100 colonies to 25 in 3 yrs. That's a climate emergency.

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

This is what Israel's "ceasefire" in Gaza looks like. https://t.co/hVPw7PFXNE

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING:

This is not Gaza.

This is Yatta, in the occupied West Bank.

Armed Israeli settlers are rampaging—burning Palestinian homes, destroying hundreds of trees, and terrorizing Palestinian families in the middle of the night.

This is terrorism.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Not sure the magnitude of this is fully understood: Israel has wiped out 2,700 families in Gaza, leaving 6,000+ people as the sole survivors of entire bloodlines. This is the result of deliberate policy, pursued with full knowledge of its effects. This is not war. It is genocide.

[Antony (Tony) Walker @tonywalker1]

Anne Twomey asks a reasonable Q. Why is it necessary to override Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act with a criminal provision that requires a higher standard of proof. Short answer: it isn't necessary @smh https://t.co/tlGDcLddSY

[Sahar A @Sahar_A_Writes]

The steadfast Louise Adler with Laura Tingle on #abc730, refusing to let Palestinians be erased:

"It is incumbent upon humanity to look at what is happening in Gaza now & say—'No, not in our name.'"

Strength to Louise & Randa amid the Adelaide Writers Festival betrayals #auspol