Erika Denise Edwards

I miss old academic twitter and the twitterstorians before the big musky sale & deliberate disintegration of actual communities on here. I learned SO much from so many folk. And got multiple opportunities from connecting w scholars on here.

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.

✍️Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic 💭 An intellectual history exploring how free & enslaved Black people in the early Atlantic conceptualized & contested ideas about slavery & freedom 🕰️Out on Dec 5th '24 🤫 already online cambridge.org/core/books/sla…

Plotting for Freedom: An Enslaved Couple's Intimate Letters in the Age of Atlantic Slavery with Hurst Publishers has a gorgeous cover and is available for pre-order! Genres: Historical biography, with experiments in narrative non-fiction. hurstpublishers.com/book/plotting-…

@BlackCatrachoBK Damn straight!!! So happy for you!

This headstart kid, born and raised in Bushwick by immigrant parents/siblings, NYC Public school kid will be an Associate Professor of Africana Studies with tenure starting September 1, 2026. Missing my folks pretty horribly, grateful for their life sustaining imprint.

When you commodify education as a means to an ends which is employment and not actually knowledge pursuit this is the inevitable conclusion

The word of the day is HABIBI! Happy #ArabAmericanHeritageMonth from Ramy Youssef, Elmo, and all of your friends on Sesame Street!

This part.

I'm doing a ton of research for my dissertation on the impact digital spaces have on reading habits and culture. You know which demographic reads the most in study after study, year after year? College-educated Black women.

@theserfstv All discovery documents available here, including transcripts of all the depositions mla.org/Resources/Advo…

I am too Jewish to ever turn my back on the Palestinian people. I am too Jewish to ignore an ongoing genocide. I am too Jewish to give up on justice. It is my Jewish values that bolster my support for a free Palestine.

Women weren't allowed to open a bank account in the usa until 1974 ??????!!???!!???!???!?!?!?!?!

International law students should just go ahead major in literature since y’all are dealing with fiction anyway.

@Phil_Lewis_ This is the person who started the chat: Latino linkedin.com/in/abel-carvaj…

Florida Cuban — Abel Carjaval, is the Secretary for the Miami-Dade Republican Party. He was just exposed for running a group chat that used the n-word over 200 times and called for the extermination of Black people Other members include Dariel Gonzalez and Ian Valdes

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s GOP started a group chat for conservative students Within 3 weeks, it was filled with over 400 instances of the N-word, Nazi rhetoric and writings of "dozens of ways of violently killing Black people" miamiherald.com/news/politics-…

These are law students, by the way. The future lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and policymakers. When we talk about systemic racism, this is what we mean. It is embedded in the institutions themselves. And it’s hard to believe people who openly think this way will suddenly become fair advocates for Black clients once they enter the legal system.

@Phil_Lewis_ “Total Negro Death!” Gonzalez wrote in one message… & discussed “colored professors…I refuse [sic] to be indoctrinated by the coloreds,” he wrote. rjha.net/dariel-gonzale…