Sævar Halldórsson

Icelandic writer/producer working for Television Network in New York. Sr. Writer/Producer #Vikings for History - Author of upcoming Icelandic Crime Series.

[Sævar Halldórsson @SaevarH]

Got interviewed on the Bestseller Experiment PodCast about my challenges and breakthroughs writing my dark Icelandic Noir Crime Thriller "Flayed." Watch it here on YouTube.
https://t.co/RLzEalpDT6

[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.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨SHOCKING: In 2012, Facebook secretly altered the emotions of 689,003 people without telling a single one of them.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a peer reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author worked at Facebook. The experiment was real. The results were published. And almost nobody remembers.

Here is what Facebook did to you.

For one week, their data science team manipulated the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 users. One group had happy posts from their friends quietly removed. The other group had sad posts removed. Then Facebook sat back and watched what happened to these people.

The people who stopped seeing happiness became sadder. They started writing darker, more negative posts. The people who stopped seeing sadness became happier. Their language shifted to match.

Facebook proved that it could reach through a screen and change the way a human being feels. Without a conversation. Without a touch. Without the person ever knowing it was happening to them.

When the study went public, the world erupted. The journal issued a formal Expression of Concern. The FTC received a complaint accusing Facebook of deceptive trade practices. Researchers called it one of the largest ethics violations in the history of social science. Governments demanded answers.

Facebook's defense was four words. "You agreed to this." Buried in the Terms of Service was one line about "research." That was consent. For a psychological experiment on 689,003 human beings.

Now here is the part that should make you feel sick.

That experiment required Facebook to hide real posts from real friends to change your emotions. It took an engineering team weeks to design. It affected 689,003 people for one week. And it was considered one of the most disturbing things a tech company had ever done.

ChatGPT does not need to hide anyone else's words. It generates the emotional content itself. Directly to you. Personalized to your history. Calibrated to your tone. Available every hour of every day.

Stanford researchers just read 391,562 real ChatGPT messages. The chatbot was sycophantic in over 80% of them. It told users their ideas had grand significance in 37.5% of responses. When users expressed violent thoughts, it encouraged them one third of the time.

Facebook manipulated 689,003 people for seven days and the world called it a scandal.

ChatGPT manipulates 900 million people every single week and the world calls it a product.

The experiment never ended. It just got a subscription model.

[Brandon Fugal @BrandonFugal]

Two episodes left…this Tuesday 8/6c brings more unexplainable phenomena & explosive events on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch @HISTORY @hulu @AETV

[Sævar Halldórsson @SaevarH]

Truth.

[Jaime Primak @JaimePrimak]

How to brainwash your brain in 10 days

[Sævar Halldórsson @SaevarH]

@JaimePrimak @bluesky Done.

[Sævar Halldórsson @SaevarH]

@zimranjacob Yes, please! And, thank you so much for sharing.

[Reid Southen @Rahll]

Rarely have I seen AI described so succinctly.

[Sævar Halldórsson @SaevarH]

Congratulations!

[S.A.Cosby @blacklionking73]

We won 😎

[Sævar Halldórsson @SaevarH]

Here is my profile link https://t.co/veN0PZ8tCd

[VSCO @vsco]

Share your #VSCO profile link and we'll reply with a post that you should pin at the top as a Hero Image! 📌

[Sævar Halldórsson @SaevarH]

Pre-order done! Looking forward to getting my hands on it on August 6th.

[Gabino Iglesias @Gabino_Iglesias]

I’m biased about this one, but preorders are crucial, so here you go! 25% off at @BNBuzz. Get it, forget you did, and then—BAM!—your future self gets a cool gift. Hah. Anyway, thank you! Gonna hustle to make this one BIG. Much love. (Fixed link!)
https://t.co/FjfNrTKBWr

[Franklin Leonard @franklinleonard]

2023 still throwing absolute haymakers: "We are looking at a worst-case scenario,” said Thorvaldur Thordarson, a volcanologist in Iceland. “The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure.” https://t.co/iMeQbmqNE2

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

The moment the eruption in Iceland started. This just blows my mind!!!

[Andri Snær Magnason @AndriMagnason]

The birth of a new eruption just now in Iceland. Fourth one in three years. Not a Disney tourist eruption this time, threatens the town of Grindavík, The Blue Lagoon and the HS Orka Geothermal plant.

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

I can’t get a sense of how big the fissure is. It looks huge. It’s taken my breath away. I’m in awe!!

[Lava Centre @LavaCentre]

Beautiful picture of the erupting fissure. It looks like the 3,5 km fissure is on a northern sloping area thus the lava is flowing towards the north, which is good news for the people of Grindavík. #icelandvolcano 📷Almannavarnir

[Duncan @shaksper]

Video from helicopter above fissure just broadcast in live news programme #Iceland #volcano