Joelle

The Felt sense is my first language

[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.

[Joelle @joelleishere]

https://t.co/YFmRtHs3Kz

[Athena Forum @AthenaForumEU]

With Athena, we’ve come together across Europe to build something extraordinary: a European initiative for sex-based rights, democratic values and political courage. Thanks to people like you, this work is possible. Thank you for your support.

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@dianeukc @SoniaPoulton You are a pioneer in your own right! Great to hear/meet you at Common knowledge talk and to have both your voices heard 🌟

[Joelle @joelleishere]

Sunset at Yellowcraig Beach by N Berwick in E Lothian, Scotland

[Oracle Girl @realOracleGirl]

Even the small things you do shape this reality

[SammyArmstrong @SammyRArmstrong]

The Amish have just a 4% obesity rate—9x lower than most Americans.

They're less anxious and live longer than most of us.

Their secret? Not restrictive diets, gyms, or fitness trackers.

But 10 simple habits that let them age without decline:🧵

[Joelle @joelleishere]

Walked the labyrinth before the event last night to slow down and prepare... So appreciate coming together again live after SIR... Feels like a lot has shifted and transformed since 2 months ago 🔥

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@LisaLowy5 😁

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@Ann1362955 Everything is our perspective 💗

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@S_Brennt I love that song too! I feel the same about the 60s. Yet I guess we experienced it in our own way. The music at the time felt very potent.

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@annamaria_ixela Yes 🕊️

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@anniediamo48298 Me too🌸

[plumedserpent @plumedart]

A living chair made of plants. I imagine sitting on one of these, immersed in the field of the plant being and the plant feeling me. What would we be communicating about, I wonder...
https://t.co/Lt5dhbOK8E

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@SanDra251953649 Lovely

[Joelle @joelleishere]

From Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh 🌻💛⛰️💛🌻

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@MichT_artist 💥

[Joelle @joelleishere]

@ananahmissy It was lovely

[sstopp @sstopp2]

@jk_rowling This was my experience.

[todd dillard @toddedillard]

I have this poem I like too much to send to journals so I am sharing it here

[Carnivore Aurelius ©🥩 ☀️🦙 @AlpacaAurelius]

the world is splitting into 2:

1) people going all in on the fake modern technological garbage...seed oils, beyond meat, porn, VR, casual sex, news, vapes, polyamory, sunscreen, etc

2) people returning to tradition, what's stood the test of time...truth, beauty, virtue, steak, religion, family, cows, nature, books, butter, milk, sunlight, land, community, self sufficiency, breast milk

which way will you go?

the problem with the modern world isn't merely seed oils...

every single institution is failing...medical, education, media, food, banking and this isn't just a coincidence...

the crisis of modernity is all connected and it stems from a wholesale rejection of TRUTH.

rene guenon wrote about this in the early 20th century...

every single society before our modern revolved around a core set of metaphysical principles...it basically had an operating system and north start that everyone lived their lives by...

but over the course of the last 300+ years we've lost this guiding light.

instead, we've been left with a vacuum in its place, a God shaped hole if you will and nefarious forces swooped in, pounced on the opportunity, coopted every single institution for their own gain.

our lives used to be motivated by the search for truth and beauty...but today instead it's run by our selfish, lower, animalistic desires for pleasure, power and sex.

paradoxically, through our obsession with our own human drives -- sex, power, status -- we devolve into mere subhumans and end up creating the most anti human world in history.

if we want to return, it's not going to come from a political change or banning seed oils...

it will come from a complete reorientation towards TRUTH once again...who are you really? what is the world? and most importantly what is God?