Last time we met, I lost my heart. This time, I found it. #LossLit

Tea #JoyLit

Welcome to #LossLit Wednesday! Today is May 20, 2026. We will be here for the next two hours (9-11pm) #LossLit is a digital project where we come together and talk about the idea of #Loss and how we deal with it. Please come and join us : #LossLit #JoyLit

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.

"2026 is going to be my year!" Me in April:

Welcome to #LossLit Wednesday! We are here for the next two hours; we like to discuss or exchange on the idea of #Loss as it affects us. Everyone is welcome to join in - Pls use the hashtags below: #LossLit #JoyLit

The world is in a very dark place right now, Hold close to those you love. #LossLit

Let me fix that for you. 🪵 (😅) = 💧🪵 😄

To be honest, I'm wondering why he gave the owl an MBE in the first place?

Hello & Welcome to #LossLit Wednesday! Its been the first day of Ramadan for some, and a rainy, messy evening for most Londoners. For us though, it is our weekly get together; where we all meet up to write, read and perhaps, also contemplate. Come join us- #LossLit #JoyLit

A fresh hyperfixation is the strongest painkiller known to man. I could be drowning in stress, but then I get An Idea™ (usually at 11 PM). Suddenly, my anxiety is gone. My bills do not exist. I am not a person with problems I am a God with a vision and 43 browser tabs open.

It is #LossLit Wednesday! We will be online shortly from 9-11pm GMT ✍🏾📝🖊️✒️🖋️

If Christmas is hard, If you’ve lost someone dear. Just look in your heart, And you’ll know they’re still here. The star in the sky, The light falling snow. The robin outside, It seems like they know. If this is a time, When you’re struggling through. Just do what you can, For what matters, is you. There’s no need to be merry, There’s no need to be bright. Just do what you can, It will all be alright. Source: @Toots Design

Group performs Beethoven’s symphony No.5 a cappella [🎼 HotPlaysMusic]

AI is changing UX. Instead of forms, we'll have conversations. AI knows your balance, your calendar... You say, "Get me to Prague by Friday." It handles the rest. UXers: think beyond the screen! #AI #UXDesign

Would you like an early Christmas present? Would you like these pin badges? All you have to do is RT this tweet & I will select a winner one week from today. Good Luck.

This—this, is everything.

Really looking forward to bringing my harp and penguins to Bridgwater soon! 🐧🐧🐧🐧 It's free, but please book your place. See you there! @SomersetLib #BookTwitter #penguins #Bridgwater