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.
— Ihtesham Ali (@ihtesham2005) May 18, 2026
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and… pic.twitter.com/9FDGAKPA6I
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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.
BigRobSA said:
Dropping phonics as a primer
"new math"
teaching feelz over science
"smart" devices
the list is growing
deddog said:BigRobSA said:
Dropping phonics as a primer
"new math"
teaching feelz over science
"smart" devices
the list is growing
The democrat takeover of schools.
I can only speak of Austin ISD - after Trump won the first time, the main goal of school was to trot out mindless democrat voting drones, instead of education.
This has direct impact on English for one. I've posted many times on here, about how all of the "classics" were replaced by minority author books. Pretty much every reading comprehension essay was speeches by Bernie, Biden, Obama and even Greta Thunberg. With loaded questions like "why is the speech effective"
Absolutely diabolical.
It's working.
Austin has traditionally voted about 70-30 Democrat. Austin ISD had a mock vote during the last election cycle where it was 90-10.
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Public school in the US is a joke and hinders our ability to be competitive on the world stage. I graduated back in 2005 from Lewisville ISD. I graduated somewhere in the top 20% and I remember studying for one test, my entire high school career. It in NO WAY prepared me for college. It was just an exercise in sitting in a classroom for 12 years to get a piece of paper saying I sat there for 12 years. I wouldn't do homework and I wouldn't study for tests.
I got to A&M and was crushed, that first semester, because I had never learned good study habits.
aggiehawg said:
Can HS grads still take tests to place out of freshman classes such as English Comp and English Lit? I recall not having to take those required courses because I placed out. (One reason why I graduated from A&M at 20 years old. Also placed out of math and algebra required courses.)
akm91 said:
Not just the quality of teachers but the educational infrastructure overall. My wife had an AP tell her that giving out consequences don't deter bad behavior.
Public school teachers now end up spending more time dealing with behavior issues in the classrooms than actual teaching.
aggie93 said:aggiehawg said:
Can HS grads still take tests to place out of freshman classes such as English Comp and English Lit? I recall not having to take those required courses because I placed out. (One reason why I graduated from A&M at 20 years old. Also placed out of math and algebra required courses.)
Yes, AP and Dual Credit with CC are very common now instead of the CLEP tests we took back in the day. My son started school with almost 70 hours and is an academic Senior after his first year, my older son graduated in 3 years. That said typical nowadays is 20ish hours of college credit mainly around the basics (English, Poli Sci, History, etc and sometimes Math and Science). I remember when I had 7 hours of college credit starting off I had the most out of my 23 Corps buddies, very few had any college credit.
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If you've ever taken the AP Language Arts test, the rhetorical analysis essay question literally is "why is the speech effective?"
Bull Meachem said:aggiehawg said:Quote:
Blame those crazy Founding Fathers for that.
Not completely accurate. What we think of as public education today is a top down structure funded in large part by the federal government.
That was not one of the core functions the Founders envisioned for the federal part of the republic. Left that to the states.
I remember watching the film (remember those when your teacher would wheel in that giant projector and pull down all the blinds? MOVIE DAY!) back in the 60s when there was quite a debate about whether the federal government should even be involved with public schools (not universities) at all.
Less than 20% of funding for Texas public schools come from the federal government. Most of that includes funding to Title 1 schools, special education, and the school nutrition program.
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I just ended up going from 9th to 11th grade. I skipped 10th grade.
Over_ed said:
https://time.com/article/2026/05/16/student-test-scores-reading-math-us/
Stanford has released new reading/writing scores for school districts across the US and they are abysmal - unprecedented-ly bad.
Quick historical review of student reading/writing performance:
1970 - 90 Slow steady improvement
1990 - 05 Sharp improvement - particularly in minority/low income
2005 - 15 Plateau
2015 - 25 Precipitous decline
Between 2015 and 2025 students lost an average of between .5 year and 1.4 full years of learning. So - the equivalent of previous generation leaving school around the end of their Junior year.
The elephants in the room -
dismantling of no child left behind with it's required testing
increased children's screen time
increased chronic absenteeism
COVID closures
The good news - the past couple of years have seen slight increases, particularly in states with early literacy reforms : Maryland, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, and the District of Columbia.
Same comment I have made in at least 6 OPs over the past 2 years- parents need to get their kids unhooked from their screens. Please.
A community college professor named Marty Lobdell taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years. The video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings online, with over 10 million views.
— Kyronis (@kyronis_talks) May 21, 2026
He spent his career watching students fail not because they were lazy,… pic.twitter.com/c9WjzH0Khw
