Susan Gray

Theatre. Books. Art. Heritage.

[Alzheimer's Society @alzheimerssoc]

We welcome the Prime Minister's comments on Jon's diagnosis. What we need to see now is real action to improve care for the 1 million people living with dementia.

Dementia is the UK's biggest killer, but it isn’t given the attention it deserves. We wouldn’t accept that for cancer or heart disease – which is why we’re unapologetically demanding better for everyone affected by dementia.

[Alzheimer's Society @alzheimerssoc]

Veteran news anchor Jon Snow has shared that he’s living with dementia, speaking publicly for the first time to raise awareness of a condition affecting around 1 million people across the UK.

Jon and his wife, neurologist Dr Precious Lunga, are supporting Alzheimer’s Society @alzheimerssoc and shared the story of Jon’s diagnosis in @DailyMail as part of our Defeating Dementia campaign with the newspaper.

https://t.co/Sy08OWXmms

We’ve partnered with Jon, in association with @Channel4, on a powerful new documentary airing on 20 June. Jon Snow: A Last Big Story looks at how he’s navigating life with dementia, and how, when we all come together, we can change the story.

Thank you to Jon and Precious for their courage and openness to bring much-needed attention to dementia 💙

@jonsnowC4

Photo credit: Cynthia R Matonhodze

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@EdinFeminists Next they’ll be asking them to ring handbells and chant “unclean” as they enter…

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@LBFlyawayhome 😂😂😂

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@DavidCharnock5 @artinsociety Thanks, I couldn’t find the mirror!

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@Helen_Fields Enjoy. Strout’s writing is just wonderful.

[dee nickerson @dEEN1cKers0n]

June already

[Old Gassy @OldGassy1984]

Nicola Sturgeon finds herself struggling to log in to a website...

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@SimonPia1 Interesting point.

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@euanmccolm Spot on Euan, her writing in no way passes for journalism. Why on earth is The Herald giving space to this adolescent rant?

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@springmeister Love the birdsong

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@tracygilbert72 @ScotParl Absolutely

[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.

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@salltweets I am so sorry Sall. Yet again I can’t believe this has happened.

[For Women Scotland @ForWomenScot]

She actually got this wrong, but it just shows who these people are. Kate doesn't want debates in the open, she wants to sneak in massive changes. This isn't how democracies are supposed to work!

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@Beathhigh Going next week. Reading your review and now looking forward to it even more.

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@HWarlow Hi Helen. The National Museum of Scotland has some wonderful De Morgan plates on display which have a gorgeous lustre glaze.

[#WOMENSART @womensart1]

Embroidered hanging of wool on linen depicting a pomegranate tree, roses and other flowers, foliage and birds, designed by May Morris, 1891, and worked by May Morris and Theodosia Middlemor. #Womensart

[Susan Gray @susgray]

@silverpebble Beautiful Emma. Love the jug.