Nothando Mazibuko

Pan Africanist | Social Entrepreneur

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

I wonder why GBV and rape are so rampant in South Africa. Could it be because domestic issues and emotional abuse aren’t taken seriously until someone is bleeding?

[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.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Do your kids do chores?

An 85-year ongoing study conducted by Harvard researchers has found a strong connection between doing chores and later professional success and happiness.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

Your iPhone is tracking every place you've ever been.

Apple turned it on the day you bought it.

12 settings you need to change right now before you leave this app:

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

@Kozmic_Lou @ABmrJutt Because some people are only sexually active after marriage…

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

@FabrizioRomano @grok can you explain this situation in detail

[Emerald van Zyl @interrec]

URGENT MESSAGE TO ALL STANDARD BANK CLIENTS - BE AWARE!!!!! R 2 MILLION was withdrawn from client's account. SB tried to GAG client . Matter been refer to the National Financial Ombud scheme. SB refuses to assist them in their investigation. Client is a medical doctor.

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

@grok @sosibusi @SABCNews If such chemicals are present in all pads, what about disposable nappies? Like Huggies and Pampers

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

@grok @sosibusi @SABCNews @grok Which pads 100% don’t have any of these chemicals?

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

https://t.co/AiGjkp3513

[Dekyn Peters, DBH (c), Ed.D (c),MPH-CHES @kynny23]

This kind of rhetoric is dangerous and dishonest.
There is no white genocide in South Africa — and world experts, human rights organizations, and South Africa’s own crime data all confirm that.

What is real is:
• systemic inequalities caused by apartheid
• land disputes rooted in centuries of colonial theft
• political weaponization of fear to divide people along racial lines

Using genocide language to describe land reform while ignoring the generations of actual state-sanctioned violence committed against Black South Africans isn’t foreign policy — it’s propaganda.

And pulling out of global cooperation because you don’t like the facts doesn’t make America stronger. It isolates us, destabilizes alliances, and replaces diplomacy with conspiracy.

Leaders should tell the truth, not stoke racial fear to score political points.

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

Why does it take so long to punish such people? Where are the other 9? Do they even deserve to live?

[Newzroom Afrika @Newzroom405]

[Please note that the next report contains graphic details]

The alleged mastermind behind the gang rape of 33 year old Thandeka Mhlanzi is returning to the Pietermaritzburg Magistrate’s court this morning
Nkululeko Sibiya was arrested two weeks ago, whilst the other suspects remain at large. Mhlanzi was brutally attacked over a year ago, her attacker stuffed bottles and drugs in her private parts. Phila Mthembu has more.

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

@YuckFouTube @JIMItheGRIN7369 @RealCandaceO Actually, Africa is quite great. Have you visited?

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

@JayNedaj 😂😂😂😂

[eNCA @eNCA]

A disturbing video of a brutal attack at a Cape Town school circulating on social media, has sparked outrage. The Western Cape Education Department says Milnerton High School is investigating the attack on a Grade 10 pupil. In the video, several boys can be seen beating a fellow pupil with bats and hockey sticks while celebrating the ordeal. #DStv403 #DStv194 #TheSouthAfricanMorning #QuestionThinkAct

[EFF_Western Cape @EFFWesternCape_]

Western Cape EFF Youth Command en route to Milnerton High School to demonstrate and make a statement against bullying.

[D @Katos_D]

Why was this bully's name and face exempted from the list provided??

Milnerton High School

[IG:Joy-Zelda @joy_zelda]

The Principle of Milnerton High School is Mr. Gert Van Tonder

Let's make him Trend

[IG:Joy-Zelda @joy_zelda]

This is one of the Bullies at Milnerton High School whose name was removed from the list

His name is Morgan Lodewyk

Let's make him Trend

[Nothando Mazibuko @thenothando]

@AGHamilton29 @theAmericanBen @grok give me context