Cllr Ash Sutcliffe

I just want things to be great for everyone, #interiors obsessed I own @liveliketheboy & love #Colne I’m a #Pendle Borough & #Lancashire County Councillor

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

@ListerLawrence Dinosaurs make everything cool 😂

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

I love to eat al fresco but I’ve never really got bbqs

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

Truly fascinating

[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.

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

Austria #Eurovisión2026

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

Kemi ❤️

[Steve Loftus @LoftusSteve]

You should vote Tory on Thursday.

Not because Kemi is great, or Nige is not. It's not a GE.

There's only one reason. Conservative councils are generally the best run councils in the country.

[Kitty Thompson🐿 @kittyraethomp]

2 tables ➕ 4 chairs 🟰 £££ a year 🤯

Councils call it a 'pavement licence'.
Hospitality businesses call it a rip off.
We call it a Table Tax.

The government should scrap it.
If you agree, sign our petition 🔗👇

#ScrapTheTableTax

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

@Tim_Cookey @scott_mills Oh bloody hell

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

@scott_mills depnds if the "personal data" is of a slightly erm risque nature!!!

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

@Tim_Cookey @scott_mills Goodness I can’t remember what this was in response to after 17 years!

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

Kemi all the way

[Jack Elsom @JackElsom]

Kemi Badenoch arrives on a truck branded with Tory “Fuel Britannia” branding

[Denby Pottery @denbypottery]

We need your help to #SaveDenby!
We are sad to share that we may be forced to close and a British institution could be lost.

We need your help:
1. Share this post
2. Sign the government petition
3. Buy Denby
4. Visit us at the Pottery Village

Read more: https://t.co/g17lHz2ETx

[Gail Myerscough @GailMyerscough]

Hello!
It doesn’t cost anything to retweet but it helps me spread the word about my small business.
My online shop is full of bold & colourful prints, homewares, T-shirts and cards.
I’m also available for freelance design work and art licensing.
https://t.co/efvD9JdtEG

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

Well done, Andrew! A great question and the reply just proved your point.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 WATCH: Tory MP Andrew Snowden attacks Keir Starmer's "pre-scripted nonsense" answers which bear "no resemblance" to the questions asked

Starmer: "They don't want to talk about the war because they supported going into the war without thinking of the consequences"

#PMQs

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

It’s been a while but I’ve just ripped yet another pair of jeans (no pic because I always get told off)

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

Feel like every time I look at what’s on tv at this time of day it’s Masterchef

[WowHaus @WowHauser]

I love the originality of this 1960s modern house in Hessle, East Yorkshire, which is just up for sale. Designed by an architect for his own use, with so many details from the original build in place. https://t.co/Lx8HIQ9OWh

[Robbie Moore MP @_RobbieMoore]

My question to the Prime Minister today 👇

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

@MrStevenMoore @nationaltrust It’s mind boggling, these places were once magical and they’re systematically turning them into bland mausoleums of self righteousness

[Cllr Ash Sutcliffe @knitboy]

@Timoldland I live not far away from here, it’s not the best area but sat in its own grounds so not a massive issue. I agree, it’s incredibly stylish