Jock Scot

Hoots mon.🎩☮️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 x.com/i/grok/share/g…

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.

Coulda been Scotland. England says no. There ye go.

We all knew Trump would go after Thomas Massie because of the Epstein files, which is another reminder that they still need to release the rest of the Epstein files.

Tomorrow the touring production of Spamalot comes home to where it all began at the Schubert Theater Chicago, now called something else. I suggested they make a speech saying Eric is absent writing a new play for the Robert F Kennedy Center about vaccination, called A small Prick in the arse….

Israel has kidnapped the sister of the president of Ireland.

Here’s a short video showing off how I captured a plane in front of the sun, even though they follow less predictable paths than aircraft. The hardest part wasn’t even taking all those photos…

"Lahaina Noon," is a trippy phenomenon that happens twice a year in Hawaii, where all objects lose their shadows It begins in Hawaii TODAY, starting on the Big Island

“We must choose between champagne for a few or drinking water for all.” — Thomas Sankara

There is not a single human who truly needs AI to survive, but every living creature on Earth needs clean air and fresh water.

Every toxic workplace has a person everyone knows is the problem and a leadership team pretending they don't.

☢️ A Utah physics professor just compared the proposed Utah Stratos AI data center to 23 nuclear bombs a day- and the math actually checks out!! 🤯 🔹 Stratos Campus: 16–17 GW thermal load/ 1,468 TJ/day released 🔹 Hiroshima = 63 TJ 🔹 That's 23.3 bombs/day of heat! ⚠️SAY NO!

Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Cuba, Venezuela, proxy war in Ukraine, and now Bolivia... Is there no limit to the empire's destruction ?

“It is always the mark of a barbarian to destroy something he does not understand.” — Arthur C. Clarke

The United States government, with the full support of the Biden administration, was advocating that Pakistan oust President Imran Khan from the government.... Because he didn't support Ukraine. It's so disgusting. He's languishing in prison to this very day.

If capitalism is so great, why do corporations need so many tax breaks, subsidies, exemptions, grants, legal protections, bailouts, and trade protections? When citizens need these things, why is it socialism?

🇨🇳🇺🇸美國財長貝森特進入會場未佩戴參會標誌，直接被中方警衛攔下，直到隨行人員拿來證件才放他進去。 這就對了，不管你是誰，都得按照規矩辦事。🤔

The sun hits the Earth with 10,000 times more energy than we use. Every. Single. Day. We're not running out of power. We're just stuck using the wrong kind-because billionaires don't own sunlight.

Millionaire: Makes $20m in 2026 Millionaire: Hires "artist" to make "art" for $25k Artist: Puts one streak on canvas Millionaire: Thanks artist and has art appraised by an appraiser in his same circle of friends Appraiser: Values artwork at $20m Millionaire: Donates $20m artwork to museum to get $20m tax write off Millionaire: Pays no taxes in 2026 Me at museum: This is stupid, it's just a line on a canvas Hipster next to me: No, you just don't understand it because you're uncultured."