Not long ago, I came across a post on Instagram that claimed “Modern screens are making everyone dumber, destroying our ancient neural network.” It referenced a new study comparing handwriting and typing, claiming to prove what so many already feel in their gut: that writing by hand is inherently better. I’ll admit, I felt a flicker of satisfaction. I love notebooks. I’ve filled them thoughts, images, memories and writing by hand always felt more visceral. But something about the post was too ready to be believed. I traced back the study it referenced. The title alone was confident: “Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom”.
But the study didn’t actually measure learning. Participants were simply copying down familiar words. No recall. No problem-solving. No insight. As for typing, participants were instructed to use a single index finger, like they were pecking at a microwave. Of course handwriting won. It was barely a competition. And yet, that detail was nowhere in the headlines. The nuance, the methodology, none of it made the cut, because the truth had been dressed for market, not for meaning.
Link to a commentary about the study that dissects it even further: Frontiers | Commentary: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom
Before we move on, let us not overlook the absurdity of it all: drawing conclusions about the learning processes in children from an experiment conducted in the cold laboratory of university students, who did not even engage in the act of learning.
And just like that, it was circulating, repackaged into motivational reels, cited as self-evident truth: "They discovered something that explains why the most successful people still refuse to abandon pen and paper.”
But this isn’t rare. It’s the norm. I’ve seen it happen before. Like with the image of two photons, supposedly “entangled in real time.”
I’m embarrassed to say that I believed it (& even wrote a creative piece about it, I must admit), but the title is misleading. And now it's the reason why I double-check studies, like the one I previously presented.
This yin-yang image spread like wildfire, hailed as a miracle of modern physics.
Here physics was baptised in mysticism, reconstructed into an ancient symbol to lure the wandering minds of the spiritually starved. Except it wasn’t an actual photograph of entanglement. The researchers used entangled photons to intentionally construct the image. It was brilliant science, but it wasn’t what people thought it was. And so, the paper became a scripture, cited endlessly by those who never venture beyond the title.
And this is the nature of edited reality. The truth has been stylised into something that could survive in the scroll. Complexity shaved down to fit a headline.
It happens everywhere. Red meat causes cancer. Mozart makes you smarter. Swearing means you’re honest. A glass of red wine equals an hour at the gym. In all instances science was flattened into a headline digestible enough for either mass hysteria or an ego boost. Let’s not forget, each of these did begin with real data, but somewhere along the way, the data was rounded out and rebranded. Not because of some grand conspiracy, but because the system rewards what’s simple and punishes what’s complex. A study that says “maybe” doesn’t go viral.
But it’s not just science. It’s how we’ve come to process the world. We want minimalism in thought as much as we want it in design.
It’s easy to point fingers at media, at influencers, at corporations. But the deeper problem is cultural. We crave certainty. We are tired of ambiguity. We want answers that fit in a tweet, a truth that doesn’t challenge us, and a reality that doesn’t make us uncomfortable. But science was never built for comfort. It was built to be doubted. It was built to be wrong, and then less wrong, and then wrong again in a better way. We forget that science is not just a collection of truths but a method for navigating uncertainty.
We are raised to be passive recipients. Trained from childhood to open our mouths and accept whatever is spooned in: answers, ideologies, interpretations of the world softened for easy swallowing. The food is warm, pre-chewed by institutions, coated in the glaze of authority. It tastes familiar, comforting, and above all, effortless. You do not need to ask what’s in it. You do not need to lift a hand. You only need to trust that those feeding you know better.
Trust the hand feeding you. Never question the origin of the meal, never ask what’s been added, processed, or preserved. We consume information the way a child consumes mashed fruit: soft, sweet, and pre-approved.
But true knowledge is not fed. It is hunted.
There comes a point when the meals stop being satisfying. The facts feel hollow, the answers too easy. You begin to notice the taste of bias, the aftertaste of convenience. And slowly, you grow hungrier, but this time not for more, but for something real.
So you leave the table. You venture into the wilderness of the mind, where nothing is prepared for you and different things connect, things that at first glance seem unrelated. This terrain is strange and inconsistent, there are no clear signs, only patterns in the trees and the distant glimmer of something true. Searching for meaning among the shadows of lost ideas, tracing the faint imprints they left behind in a world suffocated by data that is now tangled in the web of what was once thought but now ignored.
So you study the direction of shadows and question the shape of every fruit, every conclusion. And sometimes you eat something poisonous and have to unlearn it from your system. But you get better. Your instincts sharpen. Your questions deepen. You stop fearing hunger and begin to respect it.
Because to chase knowledge is not to seek a full plate. It is to sharpen your teeth. To accept that truth is often wild, rarely tender, and never, ever spoon-fed. It’s to accept that understanding is never complete. That the deeper you look, the more the edges blur. And the closer you get to something that feels like truth, the more questions it demands you carry.
Reality will always be edited. That is the nature of memory, of language, of perception itself. But there is a difference between editing and erasure, simplification and surrender and between understanding the world and accepting the version that sells best.
So don’t hunger for the headlines. Question the framing and follow the footnote as if it were a breadcrumb trail through a forest that doesn’t want to be mapped. Let it humble you. That is the real education: not in being right, but in staying awake while the dream shifts around you.
[This was a repost of an older piece, edited and improved.]
Proud of you xxxx