Funded collaborative PhD opportunity on contested memory with me in @OUPolitics and Arthur Dudney at Arcadia: Deadline 7th Jan,link below, please share!

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.

Truth Tellers The Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit was honoured to receive a message from His Holiness Pope Leo XIV @pontifex supporting the Summit’s mission. #sirharrysummit @tinabrownlm @durham_uni @aagalloni @reuters

We are thrilled to announce that 22 exceptional new members have joined our diverse network of early-career professionals and researchers. This year's cohort welcomes the highest ever proportion of members from non-academic backgrounds, at 40%, reflecting the breadth of talent across our network. Together, they will work to develop innovative solutions to some of today's most pressing challenges. Find out more about our newly appointed members in our press release: ukyoungacademy.org/news/uk-y…

🚨 This Friday 13 March! Join us for our next upcoming GCSJ seminar on Public Opinion & National Security in the UK: A People-Centred Approach | Dr Thomas Martin 🔗 eventbrite.co.uk/e/public-op… @Dr_DonnaSmith @PreciousChatD #nationalsecurity #politics #research

I can tell it’s gonna be a productive day today since I have a research assistant on hand :)

Congratulations to @PreciousChatD and @maximeaudinet on a fantastic blog for @ConversationUK . It provides great insight on how RT India reinforces the Kremlin's "west v the rest" narrative.

RT India: how the Kremlin is spreading its ‘west v the rest’ narrative to a global audience by @PreciousChatD and @maximeaudinet theconversation.com/rt-india…

Funded collaborative PhD opportunity on contested memory with me in @OUPolitics and Arthur Dudney at Arcadia: Deadline 7th Jan,link below, please share!

Help needed: I'm on the hunt for Alumni of Politics, International Relations or Policy at @OpenUniversity We have founded the new @OUPIPS society, and would love to have some alumni join us. Please share this! 💖

⚠️New #openaccessarticle online! 🧭 #Iran and #CentralAsia: Eurasian #Geopolitics in a Changing World Order 🔍 Discover more here: loom.ly/Fx-mKrk ✒️ Aigerim Altynbek, Adilbek Yermekbayev (a al-Farabi Kazakh National University) & @EdwardWastnidge (@OpenUniversity)

UK Parliament Week starts today, raising awareness of @UKParliament & how to get involved! @OUPolitics academics are working with #UKPW again to educate more people on how they can make political change: open.edu/openlearn/society-p… @UKParlEducation @OU_FASS @OUPIPS

🚨 Our November issue is out now! 🚨 We bring to you: 🛡️ 14 research articles on evolving security in the Gulf, reckless threats, decolonizing the British army and more 💴 1 policy paper on Chinese private capital in west Africa 🌏 1 review forum on world orders 📚 26 reviews of latest IR books! Read here > academic.oup.com/ia/issue/10…

Some comments from me in this article on RT’s new show for Indian audiences @OUPolitics @OU_GCSJ straitstimes.com/asia/south-…

Call for Papers 'The Kingdom's God: The Use and Abuse of Religion in Foreign Policy' We are organising a one-day hybrid workshop on 3 December 2025 at the University of Wolverhampton @caglarezikoglu Abstracts can be submitted to c.ezikoglu@wlv.ac.uk by 15 October 2025

#Russia has accelerated its messaging and propaganda efforts to Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, using outlets like Russia Today #RT and @SputnikInt to fill the gap left by staff reductions and shuttered operations at @VOANews and other Western news services, the @BBC reports. Russian providers recently formed local station partnerships, launched bureaus, and created foreign journalism 'educational' initiatives that often promote false narratives tailored to regional audiences, which also has the effect of normalizing Russia's foreign policy actions, including in Ukraine. The diminished role of VOA, whose reach recently spanned over 400 million people and provided vetted, fact-based reporting, and the increased use of Russian providers directly empowers authoritarian #disinformation as Russia and other adversarial powers seize on the opportunity. Reporting by @julianagragnani and @MKorenyuk 👉 tipaz.org/latest-news/62bg2f…