my man was not having a great time

You think that's bad?

his own mom said this to him lol

I'm pretty sure that Miss Piggy would more than approve

I've always written everything by hand before typing. Staring at a blank word document doesn't inspire the words to come.

But a blank paper and a blue pen and the words come at a steady pace.

aaaand here's a link to the paper :)

There's a pretty damning commentary on this paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517235/full

In short:

• they didn't actually measure changes in learning; they measured theta waves which don't have a clear link to learning
• They evaluated adults, not children
• They didn't have participants do any encoding activities; they were mindlessly typing the same thing over and over
• They didn't allow participants to actually type; they had them 'type' with one finger of their right hand, when there's plenty of evidence that using both hands while encoding information leads to increased brain activity.
• They couldn't see what they were typing (no visual feedback), so any error-correction processes the brain would usually run were impaired
• The handwriting part of the experiment was completely normal and representative of using handwriting to record information.
• They didn't actually report the raw data or conduct any statistical analysis for the two parts of the experiment individually; only the differences between the two groups.

Honestly, that is....shockingly bad. Like I'm surprised this passed peer review and it makes me wonder about the journal. Of course educational science is a joke of a field anyway with little scientific rigour over the last 50 years, so maybe that's not surprising. But this sure as hell sounds like this researcher walked into this project already convinced that handwriting is better for children's learning than typing and screens, and then rigged an experiment to support that bias. If I were the editor I would retract the paper, not just include a link to the commentary.

For each trial, participants were instructed to either (a) write in cursive with their right hand the presented word with a digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the presented word using the right index finger on the keyboard. Before each trial, the instruction write or type appeared before one of the target words appeared, and the participants were given 25 s to either write by hand or type the word multiple times, separated by a space. EEG data were recorded only during the first 5 s of each trial. To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the participant was typewriting.

lmao wow

Why are people not reading these parts. Like they're reblogging posts that have criticism of a paper and saying "This is why I always use notebooks!" Trust me, if you can't even bother to fully read something you're gonna say you agree with, be it an entire paper or a freaking tumblr post, you are not smarter than anyone just because you use pen and paper.

I'm not even against the idea that writing is better for your brain than typing, but this experiment is objectively bad and does not prove anything.

Beating a dead horse reblogging this post a third time but generally speaking anytime you see a headline about a study proclaiming that the good ol' traditional way of doing [thing] is better for your brain and makes you smarter and cooler and doing it with newer technological tools doesn't Activate Your Brain™ as much and makes you dumber and lazier that should start ringing your alarm bells to go check if there's Some Bullshit going on with the methodological design, because this such a common type of "someone clearly went into this with their mind already made up about the results they wanted and deliberately designed the study to support those preconceptions" study.

Like it's something you should always be doing, but especially for stuff like this, and *especially* if the conclussion just so happens to play nicely into the confirmation bias that old method = more effort = good.

Wattpad users stop fucking that thing right now. Start eating it.

I forgot music existed for a second and thought rock sluts meant like really promiscuous geologists.

Honestly, men need to be promiscuous geologists more often too

That rat is like "sure this counts as hanging out with my friend I guess"