Fiona Critchlow

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

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.

[IOC MEDIA @iocmedia]

The International Olympic Committee announces new Policy on the Protection of the Female (Women’s) Category in Olympic Sport.

Read: https://t.co/QcU5IVxyTi

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

https://t.co/s5FuRRUCNC

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

In news that will surprise only the wilfully blind, Imane Khelif has admitted having the SRY “make male” gene.

In pursuit of their ideology, the International Olympic Committee not only allowed a male boxer into a ring with women, but also demanded we all STFU about it.

No.

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

Require the City of London to retain current cafe operators - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/3aDJJWYbzX via @UKChange

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

“We were terrified”
“It was radioactive”

[teresa smith @treesey]

Interesting exchange between @jonsopel on Stonewall and @maitlis on her experience at Newsnight when the programme was reporting on the failings of the Tavistock GIDS & how isolated the Newsnight team felt at the time: “we were terrified”

[Gary Gray McKendrick @BipolarRunner]

@BevJacksonAuth @Gillian_Philip @JohnSimpsonNews @PhilJonesy3 @matthewsyed gives an excellent explanation of how we got here.

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

😳

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

Maybe if you channeled all this anger into swimming faster you wouldn’t have come in fifth.

[World Athletics @WorldAthletics]

The World Athletics Council has approved new regulations concerning eligibility conditions to compete in the female category for world ranking competitions.

The new regulations come into effect on 1 September 2025 and will be applied to the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 25 that begins on 13 September.

Press release 🔗 https://t.co/1Nw7DTpp7q

[FiLiA @FiLiA_charity]

‘Teams of scientists are researching the unique ways that elite sport affects the female body.. It's a far cry from the era when professional female athletes told me they were thought of simply as "mini-men".’

#WEURO2025final #WEURO2025 #SaveWomensSport
https://t.co/zM4aQfIsaa

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

We'll be seeing a lot more of these court cases yet... because so many institutions have facilitated or stood by while women who know it's not possible to change sex have been bullied and hounded by gender ideologues in the workplace.

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

https://t.co/8lT6jkyJPJ

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

https://t.co/J9T9JI2Ifp

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

No wonder there is wider confusion when MPs and specifically those charged with a remit regarding Women and Equality issues are so misinformed about the SC clarification and what the Equality Act 2010 covers. Yes it covers sport, it covers everything “single sex”

[Women & Equalities Committee @CommonsWEC]

Watch our hearing with the @EHRC today at 2.20pm on Parliament Live: https://t.co/yDeW1SpCiE

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

https://t.co/vd4CgdJXof

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

https://t.co/Li5aYztTvt

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

This is excellent on how we got here with the whole sorry toxic mess on sex and gender by @MatthewdAncona

https://t.co/LxkHsnE8lV

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

https://t.co/ekoT5RTDvf

[Fiona Critchlow @swimmersmummy]

https://t.co/MHWbNPdGuT