krbaumgartner

Content manager & researcher for @AJRefugeeVoices and Holocaust Testimony UK; Transcription/ translator of 19th & 20th century German letters & documents.

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@BachmannRudi @EODHappyCaptain I could look at the photo of the bakery all day long. Die Teilchen kann man gut sehen, welchen Kuchen die wohl haben außer Streuselkuchen?

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@FloridaManV @BachmannRudi I didn't say anything about average income but average health.

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@BachmannRudi @FloridaManV Der durchschnittliche Brite ernährt sich besser als der durchschnittliche Amerikaner und ist immer noch durchschnittlich gesünder.

[LiteraryVienna @LiteraryVienna]

„Es genügt nicht, keine Gedanken zu haben, man muss auch unfähig sein, sie auszudrücken.“

Karl Kraus

[Jeff Overs @JeffOvers]

Summer in the city #London

[ENRS @enrs_eu]

📖 Yesterday, we opened Between Life and Death at Eccles Library in Salford, in partnership with @SalfordLibrary.

🌿 Our special guest was Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, who came to Britain on the Kindertransport.

📸 Take a look at the photo gallery:

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@enrs_eu @SalfordLibrary https://t.co/SN7q4fYlYL

[CDU/CSU in Europa @CDU_CSU_EP]

Fast 500.000 russische Staatsbürger verbrachten im vergangenen Jahr ihren Urlaub in Europa. Währenddessen starben zahlreiche Ukrainer 🇺🇦 durch Russlands brutale Angriffe.
🚨 Es ist höchste Zeit, die Vergabe von Schengen-Touristenvisa an russische Urlauber zu beenden.

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@lu_eder @littlewisehen Liebe geht durch den Magen?

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@DrHelenFry https://t.co/qgH4obI8XM

[Elisa Mosini 🇪🇺🇮🇹 @MosiniElisa]

Pope Leo XIV in Madrid: “I encourage you to nurture the process of European Union, which is not merely a counterweight to other powers, but a gift to humanity.”

Wonderful.
A powerful reminder of how beautiful and hopeful the European project truly is.

🇪🇺🇪🇸

[H.P. @Peine01]

„You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

Guten Morgen mit Ray Bradbury
22. August 1920 - 5. Juni 2012

[H.P. @Peine01]

„Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. "

Guten Morgen mit Franz Kafka
3. Juli 1883 - 3. Juni 1924

[H.P. @Peine01]

„Meine Sprache versteht man in der ganzen Welt."
Guten Morgen, mit Joseph Haydn
31. März 1732 - 31. Mai 1809

[H.P. @Peine01]

„Der Mangel an geistigem Lebensgehalt bedingt den Mangel an Humanität."
Guten Morgen mit Joseph Roth
2. September 1894 - 27. Mai 1939

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

In other languages the "funny bone" has rather funny names...

[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.

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@HFalconerMP I can't remember the street but I will never forget this unbelievable cathedral (and I have seen many other impressive cathedrals in England).

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@Inclutus @ronzheimer Das war eine geniale Folge. Ich habe endlich mal das Gefühl, zu wissen, was in der Ukraine gerade los ist. Danke an Paul, dass er bei Waffen-Fachbegriffen nachgefragt hat. Und der vorsichtige Optimismus ist ein Bonus. Hoffentlich bald wieder. 🙏

[krbaumgartner @krbaumgartner]

@BachmannRudi "Palmolive, Sie baden gerade Ihre Hände darin" - oder so ähnlich?