Misty

Writer. Driver. Opinions are my own and not those of an employer or client.

[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.

[Sara @piousdeenn]

Things you didn't know Muslim women are not required to do.

(But culture told you otherwise.)

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@aiishadahir Clarity

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@C_3C_3 Underpinned with verifiable credentials technology and zero-knowledge proofs. I proposed this about 5 years ago. A searchable ledger for litigants and families.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@ThrillaRilla369 About 100k.

[Mohammed 🐫 @MohamedAlUbaidy]

nobody tells you this about praying fajr in the West:

• the adhan doesn't wake you up
• no one in your house is praying
• your friends don't know what fajr is
• your alarm competes with 6 hours of sleep
• shaytan has 8 excuses ready before your feet hit the floor

and you STILL get up

you're choosing Allah in a land that doesn't remind you of Him

that's not just prayer habibi

that's the purest form of love

and He sees every single sunrise you chose Him

[Solyricon @Solyricon]

Daughters are no longer raised to be wives.
They're raised to be people. And some people are really not okay with that.

[shayla @callmeMaharani]

Just to be clear, we already have free data centers. They are called libraries.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

Everyone should learn cursive.

[!Nspirenaire〽️ @Inspirenaire]

As we are out here doing our Genealogy and looking at old census records and history, it's mostly written in cursive. There are at least 3 different decades of youth who don't know how to write or read cursive. What the schools won't teach, you better have your children learn it from somewhere else. They will lose history if they don't. #Inspirenaire

[Tal✨they/them @talyaTheeEnby]

please get a library card even if you won’t use it because cities will look at library statistics and use that to decide to keep libraries open and properly funded

[𝔖. @soniminds]

Eid Mubarak to the hospitalized, the unjustly imprisoned, the displaced, the refugees, the homeless, the grieving, the workers who had to spend it away from their families, and anyone who woke up to no one wishing them a blessed Eid.

May Allah lift all of your burdens.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@KeruboSk As a technical writer, I moved into driving commercial vehicles. (Semi then bus). Local school districts will train you to drive a school bus and pay you while you train. Then on your off hours work on the other stuff.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@salahudeen33 Thank you. I needed this.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@Charlygotyou It never stays on my face and it never fully pleased those it attempted prove my value or worth in marriage or on the job.

Healthy eating, grounded mental health, and ethics provides more beauty than product requiring borderline paint thinner to remove.

[Fzy @leofzy]

Learn politics, learn islam,understand both so clearly that no one can ever manipulate you in the name of deen or power.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@wynrosei Now that you mention it, yes, this is how I operate. It's pretty sad that it has to be that way.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@abdulcardry I am so grateful daily that Allah guided me to Islam.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

@DerrickEvans4WV I was born in America. We still have something in the Constitution called freedom of religion. You can look it up if you need a refresher on our fundamental God-given rights that the US Constitution was drawn up to protect. But you're in office or running, so you know that.

[Misty @MistySBledsoe]

Israel has had the ability to take o*t their targets with precision for decades. There is not now, nor ever has been, nor ever will be a good excuse for the level of carn*ge we have seen over the last few years.

They can choose precision, yet they do not. They want carn*ge.

[Council Estate Media @cem_uk_]

Imagine telling the world that you're liberating the women of Iran and one of the first things you do is blow up a school full of girls. Extraordinary.

[Jvnior @Jvnior]

🚨 BREAKING:

Imam of the Kaaba made this dua for
marriage at the end of Tarawih prayer!

O Allah, do not leave any single person
without granting him/her a spouse.

Repost this and say AMEEEEEEEEEEEN.