Paul Williams 🇺🇦

Is it me or are things getting worse?

[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.

[Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) @CABS_REPORTS]

One for all you Brits! Help save bird populations by making it a legal rule that all new houses built in the UK must include #Swift bricks.

Sign the petition: Save Our Swifts 👉 https://t.co/UB6aWL5ZGL

[Hannah Bourne-Taylor @WriterHannahBT]

3 years ago I launched the swift brick camapign. 2 years ago Labour voted for the same legislation they’ve just turned down. They can still embrace it but please use your voices to encourage them. Ask your MP to sign this EDM https://t.co/m09tKhIn3j

[Paul Williams 🇺🇦 @willpauliams]

Good thread 👇🏻

[Emma 💛💙🇩🇰🇬🇧🇪🇺 @MonkEmma]

🚘 FREE DRIVING LESSONS FOR REFUGEES?!

If you've seen those headlines and felt a twinge of outrage, you're not alone.

But let's take a closer look at who's actually getting these lessons and why.

🧵
1/16

[Paul Williams 🇺🇦 @willpauliams]

@teaforpterosaur Theatre tickets 🎟

[Paul Williams 🇺🇦 @willpauliams]

So this is goodbye 👋 😔

[Paul Williams 🇺🇦 @willpauliams]

Worth a read 🧵👇🏻

[Chris Rennard 🔶💙🇺🇦 @LordRennard]

@guyverhofstadt A good letter in @guardian today

[Andy Verity @andyverity]

All but the richest tenth of households will benefit from policy decisions announced in the Budget - Office for Budget Responsibility:

[Jack @FFS_WhatNow]

Something to brighten your day. Get ready for the chickens 🤣👌👏 https://t.co/iN6bx9NI9b

[Little Green Space 🦋 @LGSpace]

This autumn, please consider leaving dead plants in your garden rather than 'tidying' them up. Over the winter they will provide sheltered spots for hibernating ladybirds and lots of other creatures 🐞
#wildlife #gardening #nature

[Celia Richardson @CeliaRichards0n]

‘One teaspoon of the chemical is enough to kill 1.25 billion honeybees… by destroying their nervous systems.’

No,This can’t be allowed to happen. What is an election promise for? https://t.co/NPVQImplGo

[Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas]

Depressing news that Govt may approve bee-killing pesticide despite election promise to ban it - & outrageous that British Sugar has applied to use neonics for 5th year, despite industry commitment to end reliance in 2023. Govt must act to protect bees 🐝 https://t.co/kOJYWgWvey

[Chris Bryant @RhonddaBryant]

Comedy or tragedy 🎭

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

@JamesCleverly You should take it up with the politician who initiated the talks, which was you James

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Ofgem allowed this.

Since the pandemic electricity generation profit margins up 198%.

Electricity/Gas supply profit margins up by 363%.

British Gas profits up 10-fold last year.

BP, Shell double/treble profits.

No UK regulator protects people.
https://t.co/od1OARz5E6

[Prof Colin Talbot @colinrtalbot]

Dear @bbcnickrobinson

Pensioners are NOT the “wartime generation”.

I am 71 and born in 1952 - 7 years after the end of the war.

If you are 65 now, you were born 14 years after the war.

You’d have to be 79 now to have been born during the war.

[Paul Williams 🇺🇦 @willpauliams]

😂

[Bob Servant @bobservant]

Never forget.

[Tim Farron @timfarron]

This is getting silly now. Leave his kids out of it, and stop blowing things out of proportion. There is bad behaviour amongst some politicians, but this constant pearl clutching at everything undermines trust to an unjustified and dangerous extent. Try reporting some news.

[Tim Birch @TimBirchWild]

What's absolutely essential is that if seal pups are on a beach you stay off the beach. All dogs on leads. NO selfies with seal pups! It's a critical time for seals. They need our help.