Umbereen S Nehal, MD, MPH, MBA

Checked in for surgery and they gave my mom this sheet so she could check the board and see where I am at all times. 🤣

Anonymous I run a small bakery. Woman came in every Friday morning. Same order. Two blueberry muffins. One coffee. Always sat at the corner table. Read her book. Stayed an hour. Did this for three years. Then she stopped coming. After two months I got worried. Found her number in our loyalty program. Called. She answered. Voice weak. “Oh. Hi. I’ve been meaning to cancel that.” “Are you okay? You haven’t been in.” Long pause. “I have cancer. Stage four. I’m in hospice now. Those Friday mornings were my favorite part of the week. But I can’t make it anymore.” My heart broke. “What if I brought Friday to you?” Silence. Then crying. “You’d do that?” “Every Friday. Same time. Same order.” Showed up that Friday. She was in a hospital bed in her living room. So thin. But she smiled when she saw those muffins. We sat. She told me about her week. Her family. Her life. I listened. Just like at the bakery. Did this for six weeks. Every Friday. Last Friday she could barely stay awake. But she held that muffin. Took one bite. “Best thing I’ve tasted all week.” She passed on Monday. Her daughter called. “Mom’s last words were about you. She said ‘tell the baker thank you. Fridays kept me human until the end.’” Went to her funeral. Her daughter hugged me. “You gave her normal when everything else was hospitals and pain. You gave her Fridays.” Now I deliver to three hospice patients. Every Friday. Because sometimes a muffin isn’t just a muffin. It’s dignity. It’s routine. It’s proof that someone still sees you as you. Not as sick. Just as you.

The “Do”s of Match Week etiquette: •DO offer practical help (calls, edits, logistics) during SOAP. •DO celebrate people loudly and respect those who want to keep it low-key. •DO normalize that ANY outcome=mixed emotions. People are allowed to feel their feelings.

This is a 12-year-old study that has failed replication three times. And the underlying claim is still probably right. The paper is Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014. 67 students at Princeton. Longhand note-takers scored higher on conceptual questions. Became the most cited paper in every “ban laptops” argument on Earth. Then three separate labs tried to reproduce the result. Urry et al. at Tufts in 2021, 145 students. No effect. Morehead et al. in 2019, two experiments. No effect. A meta-analysis pooling eight similar studies. No effect. So why am I saying it’s still right? Because a 2023 Norwegian EEG study with 256 channels found something the behavioral research couldn’t measure. Handwriting produces theta and alpha connectivity patterns between parietal and central brain regions that typing does not produce. Those specific frequencies are the ones your hippocampus relies on for memory formation. Your brain treats handwriting as a motor-spatial problem. Five brain regions fire in coordination: premotor cortex, parietal cortex, cerebellum, fusiform gyrus, sensorimotor cortex. Typing activates a fraction of that network. The original study measured the right outcome with the wrong methodology. The real finding lives at the neural level: handwriting rewires the encoding process itself.

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.