cynthiadannbeardsley

A neuroscientist who spent 20 years proving that reading on screens damages your brain sat down to read her favorite novel and discovered that the damage had already happened to her. Her name is Maryanne Wolf. She runs the Center for Dyslexia at UCLA and is one of the most cited reading scientists alive. The experiment she ran on herself is sitting inside a book she published in 2018. Here is the one fact that breaks how most people think about reading. Humans were never born to read. Yes, you read that right. There is no reading center in the brain. There is no gene for literacy. Every reader builds a custom circuit inside their own skull by repurposing brain regions that originally evolved for vision, language, and recognizing objects. Wolf calls it the reading brain circuit. The circuit is not a given. It is built by use. And because it is built by use, it can be unbuilt by disuse. The circuit she spent her career mapping is not the one that just turns letters into sounds. Sitting on top of that is something she calls the deep reading circuit. Both hemispheres firing. Multiple lobes coordinating. The visual system, the language regions, the memory centers, the emotional and motor systems all firing in a choreographed sequence that takes the brain a few seconds longer to run than skimming does. Those few extra seconds are where everything important happens. Background knowledge pulls up. Analogies form. Inferences fire. The mind takes the perspective of the character. Critical analysis runs in the background while emotion runs in the foreground. New thoughts get generated on top of the author's thoughts. The decoding is the entry ticket. The deep circuit is the show. Skimming does not fire this circuit. There is no time. In 2018 Wolf ran a private experiment on herself. She decided to reread Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi, a dense novel she had loved as a young woman. She was the world's leading expert on the reading brain. She assumed her own circuit was intact. It was not. She opened the book and could not get through it. Her words, not mine. She wrote that she hated the book. The sentences felt like snakelike constructions that confuse meaning instead of revealing it. 6She described the experience as someone pouring thick molasses over her brain every time she picked it up. She wrote one sentence that should haunt anyone who reads it. "I now read on the surface and very quickly, in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels." The woman who built her entire career on the deep reading circuit had quietly lost access to her own. The mechanism is brutal in how simple it is. Eye-tracking research from Ziming Liu at San Jose State shows that when people read on screens, almost all of them fall into the same pattern. They read the first line. Then their eyes word-spot down the page in an F shape. They sample. They do not read. Whatever you stop using, your brain stops maintaining. The data is the part most people have never seen. In 2018 Pablo Delgado ran a meta-analysis of 54 studies covering more than 170,000 participants. Same text. Half on paper. Half on screen. The screen group lost by 0.21 standard deviations. Replicated by Clinton at 0.25. Replicated by Kong at 0.21. Researchers gave it a name. They call it the screen inferiority effect. The worst part is what happened over time. The gap has grown larger in studies done after 2010, not smaller. Digital natives do not outperform older readers. They underperform them on the same texts. More exposure makes it worse, not better. Screen readers are also more confident they understood than paper readers. They think they got more out of the text than they actually did. The skimmer does not know they are skimming. They believe they are reading. The stakes Wolf keeps coming back to are not academic. The deep reading circuit is the same circuit your brain uses to take another person's perspective. To weigh complex civic information. To read a contract, a ballot question, a medical disclosure and notice what is actually being said underneath what is written. If the circuit atrophies, those capacities go with it. Not metaphorically. Structurally. You are not getting dumber. You are not losing intelligence. You are quietly losing access to a specific circuit that takes longer to fire than your phone is willing to wait for. The expert who spent 20 years warning the world ran the experiment on herself and barely made it back. Most people are not running the experiment at all.

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.

Canada is a nation of explorers, builders, and innovators. Today Colonel Jeremy Hansen carries that legacy forward as he becomes first Canadian to venture to the Moon.

BREAKING: Trump’s birthright citizenship scheme implodes after lawyer’s JAW-DROPPING courtroom blunder about Native Americans. Donald Trump sent his top lawyer to the Supreme Court to argue that birthright citizenship should be stripped from hundreds of thousands of American-born babies. It went so badly that his own solicitor general nearly argued Native Americans aren't citizens either — and had to be rescued by a Trump-appointed justice. In one of the most jaw-dropping exchanges of Wednesday's already disastrous hearing, Justice Neil Gorsuch — appointed by Trump himself — pressed Solicitor General D. John Sauer on the logical consequences of the administration's own legal theory. The exchange was as stunning as it was revealing. Gorsuch asked a simple question: under the administration's proposed test for birthright citizenship, are Native Americans born today automatically citizens? Sauer's answer was a slow-motion legal train wreck. First, he said yes — obviously. Then Gorsuch pushed him to set aside the statutes granting Native Americans citizenship and answer based purely on the administration's own constitutional theory. Sauer's answer changed: "No." Under the 1868 congressional debates, he explained, children of tribal Indians were not considered birthright citizens. The courtroom went quiet. Gorsuch pressed harder. But under your test — the domicile test you want this court to adopt today — are tribal Native Americans born on U.S. soil birthright citizens? Sauer fumbled. "I think so... I have to think that through, but that's my reaction." "I'll take the yes," Gorsuch replied — essentially throwing the solicitor general a life preserver before he could drown any further. Let's be absolutely clear about what just happened. The Trump administration walked into the highest court in the land with a legal theory so sweeping, so poorly thought through, that when a justice applied it logically, the government's own lawyer couldn't guarantee that Native Americans — people whose nations existed on this continent thousands of years before the United States did — would qualify as birthright citizens. This is the constitutional chaos that Trump's executive order invites. Once you start unraveling the 14th Amendment's guarantee that all persons born on American soil are citizens, there is no clean stopping point. The administration's own lawyer proved that in real time, in front of the entire nation, while Trump was still in the building — before he turned tail and fled. The 14th Amendment was written to be clear precisely because America had already lived through the horror of deciding that some people born here weren't really citizens. The Supreme Court has upheld birthright citizenship for 157 years. And Trump's lawyer just demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, exactly why those 157 years of precedent exist. Please like and share this post if you believe the Constitution means what it says — for everyone born on American soil.

Take a good look at this picture. That's the Prime Minister of Canada sitting across the table from the President of China with the Premier of Saskatchewan right beside him. THIS IS "THE WEST IS IN* DEFINED. No premier has ever sat at a more powerful table than this. Never. Ever. And it happened with a LIBERAL PRIME MINISTER WORKING WITH A CONSERVATIVE. Let us never forget this happened especially during the Alberta referendum.

"Medicine must be practised with openness and without prejudice towards people's social circumstances. This outlook is essential to deliver holistic care." Read the winning essay for the 2025 #WakleyPrize from @DonnaWakefield_: hubs.li/Q03YQ_rb0

The EPA has approved a new pesticide that contains PFAS, or 'forever chemicals', to be used on vegetables like lettuce, broccoli and potatoes.

Here's Elizabeth May letting us know that Andrew Scheer is a LIAR!

Instead of reflecting on his leadership, when asked about the MPs who left his caucus, he attacked the Liberals, Carney, the MPs, CTV and CBC Sounds familiar? I’ll give you a hint: Donald Trump

Ontario students are struggling and Doug Ford’s response is to pay hand-picked political allies $350,000 to “fix” school boards they’ve never worked in. While classrooms crumble, Ford's gravy train is full steam ahead. #onpoli

For almost four decades, Nancy Pelosi has served the American people and worked to make our country better. No one was more skilled at bringing people together and getting legislation passed – and I will always be grateful for her support of the Affordable Care Act. She made us proud to be Democrats, and will go down in history as one of the best speakers the House of Representatives has ever had. Nancy, thank you for your leadership and your friendship. Michelle and I wish you and Paul the best in this next chapter.

There are so many complaints about #AirCanada that I feel compelled to post about the fantastic service I received today from a Vancouver #Aeroplan agent. She was a major facilitator in completing an online reservation that wouldn’t move forward.A model of true customer service.

Today, the UN family mourns the loss of Dr. Jane Goodall. The scientist, conservationist and UN Messenger of Peace worked tirelessly for our planet and all its inhabitants, leaving an extraordinary legacy for humanity and nature.

Did solid waste management forget about Vaughan Road south of St. Clair? ⁦@JoshMatlow⁩ @311 #PublicHealth

Learning a language? Four ways to smash through the dreaded ‘intermediate plateau’ theconversation.com/learning-a-lan… via @ConversationUK

Here is the full segment of Lawrence O'Donnell shredding the media performance at Trump's news conference, "Anyone who tells you that Donald Trump answered reporters' questions is lying to you and anyone who tells you that is not smart enough to know what an answer is."

Like Vice President Harris, Governor @Tim_Walz believes that government works to serve us. Not just some of us, but all of us. That’s what makes him an outstanding governor, and that’s what will make him an even better vice president. Michelle and I couldn’t be happier for Tim and Gwen, their family, and our country.