silentbookclubTO

Reading quietly in the company of bookish friends

[Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga]

"Who chooses the site of a vision, the witness or the apparition?"

#SundaySentence by Doireann Ní Ghríofa from Said the Dead (2026 @FaberBooks) https://t.co/xOs0XStugG

[Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga]

#FridayReads #WeekendReads
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (2026 @FaberBooks) https://t.co/xOs0XStugG

[silentbookclubTO @silentbookTO]

"I always reach for books
When I’m afraid of saying something true."

#SundaySentence (and #TodaysPoem, too) A Letter from the Mountain I by @TomSnarsky (2025 Animal Heart Press) https://t.co/hJeHbECpEe

[Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga]

Reflecting on the power of @silentbookclub groups - the latest report from the east end Toronto #silentbookclub chapter: https://t.co/xJ8kjO7tKc

[silentbookclubTO @silentbookTO]

"The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one."

#SundaySentence from Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952) https://t.co/EVcvh8A9zL

[Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga]

"I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams"

#TodaysPoem #poetry
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats from The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) https://t.co/oa0NuInEFY

[Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga]

Various kinds of sweeet reading for #FridayReads

John Candy by Paul Myers (@pulmyears) (@HouseofAnansi) https://t.co/cy412HTwuO
Rough Description by Don Pyle (@ECWPress) https://t.co/ViJRXxao2W
Interposition by @KaieKellough (@McClellandBooks) https://t.co/VkshUtLMvv

[silentbookclubTO @silentbookTO]

"A tiny bird arpeggiates up the fire escape."

#SundaySentence (and bonus #TodaysPoem)
“Inside of you there is a small battery … ” by @JosephKidney2 (2023 The @Ex_Puritan) https://t.co/nAWVQRa771

[Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga]

My muse Mavis approves of my latest #WackyAfghan creation. #AfghanCrochet #Crochet

[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.

[silentbookclubTO @silentbookTO]

... and here is an intriguing short film - by Marlene Goldman (@GoldmanMB) and Philip McKee - inspired by the story: https://t.co/uTcIe4pXsd

[silentbookclubTO @silentbookTO]

"The little people, waltzing now, don't even break stride: her fake teeth are of no interest to them."

#SundaySentence from Torching the Dusties by @MargaretAtwood from Stone Mattress (2014 @McClellandBooks) https://t.co/siJU4yFlgC

[Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga]

"This is the deep light you’ve waited for, unfiltered except
now and then by the memory of your first time seeing it,
soon the night-dark after that"

#TodaysPoem #poetry
This is the Light by Carl Phillips (2021 @Post_Road) https://t.co/oQprcD484S

[Sophia Proneikos @Pergament_F]

"A home library is a steady comfort." Wendell Berry

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Something interesting you might not have realized:

A number of words in English are NOUNS when you stress the FIRST syllable...

But VERBS when you stress the SECOND syllable.

-SUSpect/susPECT
-CONflict/conFLICT
-PROtest/proTEST
-CONvert/conVERT

[Olga Tuleninova 🦋 @olgatuleninova]

Until Tonight (Lunenburg, Nova Scotia)"
Acrylic on Canvas,
Created;2019
By Canadian Painter..Mark Grantham (b.1966)

[silentbookclubTO @silentbookTO]

"During the years when you knew nothing
And I knew everything, I loved you still."

#SundaySentence (and bonus #TodaysPoem)
Mother, A Cradle To Hold Me by Maya Angelou (2006) https://t.co/m33wtmSMPm

[silentbookclubTO @silentbookTO]

#SundaySentence How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It) by @DanaGoldstein

[silentbookclubTO @silentbookTO]

"At the University of Virginia, Devin Donovan, who teaches writing and rhetoric, requires students to write on paper in class, and revise drafts using scissors and tape to cut up and reorder paragraphs."

#SundaySentence by @DanaGoldstein https://t.co/Yk4ygFmU7d

[Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga]

"I feel that it's
a poet's job to think of the existential, mark
down that what confuses me into a notebook which
I can burn before my death or not."

#TodaysPoem #poetry
Scythe and Fate by Amanda Earl & Matthew Walsh in Slutflowers (2026 Knife|Fork|Book) https://t.co/U6CxWjHfxX