DrArK

@ndtv Agree. Let's change the law of inheritance the first thing in the morning tomorrow, Mr Murthy.

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.

What a horrible decision! #KaiHavertz goes studs up on the Burnley player...in a normal circumstance it's a straight #RedCard. But then it's #Arsenal. They have had a pretty special treatment throughout this year. #ArsBur #EPL

The Adani group is investing abroad in a big way esp in countries that Modi sees as diplomatic priorities; but what is good for Adani is not always good for India @CERI_SciencesPo @PSIASciencesPo @CarnegieIndia @KingsIndiaInst @BASASofficial @FT @guardian m.thewire.in/article/econom…

Dear All, WE ARE HIRING !!!!!!! E-mail us at join@internetfreedom.in

CBI arrested Prof Manisha Mandhare for #NEET paper leak. She is from modern college Pune - yes same college who has RSS connection (Milind Ekbote) and was in news for not giving clearance for Dalit student Prem Birhade last year denying him UK job. Now college is disowning Mandhare but can they?

Disenfranchising 10 Crore Indians? #SIR #VoterRights #EveryVoteMatters

Dear Students, The illiterate Govt alone isn’t responsible for your loss,Your parents who voted these illiterates into power three times are also equally responsible.

नोएडा मज़दूर आंदोलन के लिए जेल में बंद पत्रकार सत्यम वर्मा और थिएटर आर्टिस्ट आकृति पर यूपी पुलिस ने राष्ट्रीय सुरक्षा कानून (NSA) लगा दिया है. सत्यम वर्मा एक पत्रकार, सार्वजनिक बुद्धिजीवी, संपादक और अनुवादक हैं. उन्होंने यूनिवर्ता में कई वर्ष काम किया. वे “भगत सिंह और उनके साथियों के सम्पूर्ण उपलब्ध दस्तावेज़” की ऐतिहासिक कृति के संपादक हैं. रोमिला थापर की पुस्तक सोमनाथ का हिंदी अनुवाद किया है. वे जनपक्षधर बुद्धिजीवी रहे हैं, जिन्होंने हमेशा लोगों के न्यायसंगत संघर्ष के साथ एकजुटता दिखाई और अन्याय के खिलाफ असहमति की मजबूत आवाज बने. नोएडा में कभी न जाने और प्रदर्शनकारियों से कोई संपर्क न होने के बावजूद उनकी गिरफ्तारी असहमति की आवाज को कुचलने और दूसरों के लिए चेतावनी देने का स्पष्ट प्रयास है. मजदूर बिगुल की आकृति नोएडा श्रमिक मामले में एक महीने से अधिक समय से गिरफ्तार हैं. उन पर भी एनएसए लगाया जा रहा है. आकृति दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय से इतिहास में मास्टर्स और दौलत राम कॉलेज से ग्रेजुएट है. सत्यम वर्मा और आकृति पर एनएसए लगाना सभी लोकतांत्रिक आवाजों को कुचलने और डराने का प्रयास है.

The vast majority of the world's countries now have a more favourable view of China than of the United States. Data from the Democracy Perception Index 2026.

Serious question - How can those who backed Amorim will not back #MichaelCarrick? #MUFC #ManchesterUnited #ManUtd

The Power of Balance has shifted. We are entering a new #worldorder and this looks decisively different from the earlier "Rise of the East" phenomenon. #China

@UTDKobi Surprising, isn’t it, that they don’t fear another José Mourinho or Louis van Gaal situation repeating itself?

Some United fans don’t want Carrick as manager next season because they fear another Ole situation — backing a club legend based on emotions, then watching it fall apart later. Others look at the job Carrick has done so far, the way the team is playing again, the calmness he’s brought back and the results against big sides, and believe he’s earned the chance on merit. Right now, the fanbase is split between trusting what they’re seeing now and fearing how it could end later.

@Utdtruthful The bottom line? Paul Merson will remain... well...Paul Merson. Next year or the year after the next decade. Sorry to disappoint you, world!

🚨🗣️ Paul Merson: “Liverpool will finish above Man United next season. And that's without knowing what happens this summer. “Why? So many players have had good seasons for Man United and hardly anyone has for Liverpool, bar Szoboszlai. “You go through Man Utd's team and there's six or seven players who have been above average this season. “Isak will be fit, Wirtz will have a year in the league. I'm confident Liverpool will finish above Man Utd. “A lot's gone on at Liverpool. I do feel sorry for them with everything that's gone on. They've had a lot of injuries too.” #MUFC [Sky]

Is it a sign of selectively disrupted amnesia? Doesn't feel like a norm, does it?

#VAR and the #Referee gifted #Arsenal 3 points and possibly the #EPL trophy tonight. #WestHamUnited must feel robbed. Disgraceful.

@BabasahebsSikh Rewriting the Language of Politics: Kisans in Colonial Bihar, Manohar Publications, 2001 Culture, Development and the Cultural Capital of Farce: The Musahar Community in Bihar, 7Oct. EPW Caste of Marginality and Migration in Bihar, Indian Journal of Human Development,April 2024

@drKrArun Thanks so much! I am glad you found this insightful. Emotional histories through bhojpuri folk songs sounds really interesting. Would love to read your work. Yes, I feel that much of public understanding of indentured labour evades the question of caste. :)

While it is often suggested that caste largely diluted with the migrations of Indian indentured labourers, this article tells the story of how caste became entangled on ships and in colonies through the dirty work of sanitation.

@BabasahebsSikh Are you based in Delhi or London, Pritam? I'd love to have a longer conversation sometime. Here are some of my work - Beyond muffled murmurs of dissent? Kisan rumour in colonial Bihar, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2000

i agree! we should implement similar rules for religious festivals that take over the public space for a series of days, and then turn that fiesta into communalism.

US military budget is 10x more than its Education budget. #MilitaryExpenditure #War #WarEconomy #WarMongers