Spencer Doar

Capital markets/trading, Bulls/Sox fan, journalism/comms. Ever curious. Opinions are my own; retweets not (necessarily) endorsements.

[mariana Z @mariana057]

Due to the high cost of energy, the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off.

[Kris @KrisAbdelmessih]

Equities have the classic buy, box spread, die strategy

[Spencer Doar @s_doar]

Real shame is the next gen won't end up with an assorted box of notebooks from their life to lug around

[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.

[“paula” @paularambles]

they call them crisps there

[Max Turetzky @MaxTuretzky]

A UChicago student group is currently handing out onions at the Northwestern Arch to protest to the Onion Futures Act of 1958

[lana schwartz @_lanabelle]

the internet is forever unless you wrote an article for a website in 2015

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Ever since I was a little boy, I knew I wanted to log into Microsoft Authenticator 47 times a day.

[Chicago Bars @chicagobars]

Had no idea the @CMEGroup ever had a wicked sense of humor.

[Spencer Doar @s_doar]

james joyce would love the sec

https://t.co/71MF9yb2K2

[Goodyear Blimp @GoodyearBlimp]

You want a checkmark? Pay for twitter. You want status? Put your name on a blimp.

[Tracy Alloway @tracyalloway]

Allbirds, the shoe brand, now says it's an AI compute company.

[Michael Brown @MrMBrown]

“Markets are manipulated” they scream

No, pal, you were just on the wrong side of the trade 😂

[WIRED @WIRED]

As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages. https://t.co/XWEZr6Q0DF

[Jonathan 'Boo and Vote' Cohn @JonathanCohn]

A+ sign game

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Lonnie Johnson, inventor of the super soaker awarded $73M in unpaid royalties - 21 years after inventing it

[Nikhil Krishnan @nikillinit]

Got an email asking for my bank account info because a company exited and they needed to figure out distributions

Marked it as spam, didn't think of it. Founder texts me saying they're waiting on me.

So if you wanna know how my investing is going, just know that an email about returns is so foreign to me that I assumed it was a scam

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that’s why everyone does everything.

― Norm Macdonald, 2016

[Mike Vanderbilt: Hairdresser At Large @MikeVanderbilt]

Claudio The Tamale Guy’s red cooler is on display at the Chicago History Museum.

That is all.