#060: Restoring the Ability to Walk, Bigger Than Going Viral, Handwriting Increases Brain Connectivity

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week we will take a look at an incredible breakthrough for patients suffering from paralysis, a search engine that will help you navigate the world of academia, a time capsule that takes us to hidden gems within YouTube, and more.

Let's dive in:

Restoring the Ability to Walk

One of the most fascinating recent breakthroughs was found from a research team at EPFL in Switzerland. They published a paper detailing how they were able to restore the ability to walk in patients with spinal cord injuries, using 'deep brain simulation', or DBS.

What makes this significant, is that this isn't just about nerves reconnecting, but a whole new region of the brain being activated to help facilitate movement. By applying electrical stimulation in the area known as the lateral hypothalamus, the patients immediately experienced improved leg control and walking function.

This breakthrough goes beyond treating paralysis. It shows that the brain can adapt and potentially overcome many conditions thought at one point thought to be incurable. The future of biotech looks extremely bright, and we can't wait to see what happens next.

The Perplexity of the Academic World

We found an academic search engine that will help you find the best science, faster. It's called Consensus.app, and it's a pretty interesting concept for an AI research assistant.

Essentially, if you're researching something and need to find academic articles and citations, this app will help you find them extremely fast. It searches a database of over 200+ million academic papers, and gives you answers that are laid out in a super easy way to read.

It reminds us a lot of Perplexity, except it's catered more towards academic and medical professionals. This is evident by how answers are supported with how credible the supporting papers are, with Scientific Journal Rankings and 'influential citations' provided for each response.

Something Worth More Than Going Viral

What does it mean to be human in an increasingly digital world? Looking at how the internet is evolving, it seems like things that were originally created with pure intention are now being lost due to algorithms designed to capture and hold our attention hostage. Two recent projects worked to restore the original spirit of early content creation.

Before I share the projects, a little context is needed: Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads have titles with their default filenames from the phone, and this effectively creates a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.

Ben Wallace and Riley Walz both made sites that compile and showcase these videos randomly, allowing you to see incredible 'ordinary' moments. Some are as simple as a woman receiving a book in the mail, to life-changing events such as a wife filming herself tell her husband that she's pregnant.

These incredible projects work to restore something that has been lost, and we hope to see many similar initiatives in the future.

Handwriting Leads to Brain Connectivity

It's recently been discovered that handwriting leads to widespread brain connectivity. In a brilliant thread from Dr. Nicholas Fabiano, he outlines the discoveries from a study performed on 36 university students:

Digital devices are increasingly replacing traditional handwriting, and both writing and reading are becoming increasingly digitized in the classroom.

Using a keyboard is now often recommended for young children as it is less demanding and frustrating, allowing them to express themselves in written form earlier.

However, handwriting training has not only been found to improve spelling accuracy and better memory and recall, but also to facilitate letter recognition and understanding.

When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions.

Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning.

These findings suggest that the spatiotemporal pattern from visual and proprioceptive information obtained through the precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen, contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning.

It is proposed that children, from an early age, must be exposed to handwriting activities in school to establish the neuronal connectivity patterns that provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning...

The Math Academy Way - Condensed

The Math Academy Way is a working draft authored by Justin Skycak, the Director of Analytics for Math Academy, which outlines the principles of how to 'supercharge student learning' through science. It's a relatively long book, though, at nearly 400 pages of raw information.

Justin recently shared a slightly more abridged version, which highlights the key findings of the most reproduced and verified learning methods from the last century.

Here is a sample of five of the most effective learning strategies researched:

Active Learning - students learn more when they are actively performing learning exercises as opposed to passively consuming educational content.
Deliberate Practice - effective learning feels like a workout with a personal trainer and should center around individualized training activities that are chosen to improve specific aspects of one's performance through repetition and successive refinement.
Mastery Learning - each individual student needs to demonstrate proficiency on prerequisite topics before moving on to more advanced topics.
Minimizing Cognitive Load - because our brains can only process small amounts of new information at once, it's critical to break down skills into tiny steps.
Developing Automaticity - to free up mental processing power, it's also critical to practice low-level skills enough that they be carried out without requiring conscious effort.

For the full list and brief explanation of each, be sure to check out Justin's tweet here

P.S Can you please respond to this email and bring it into your 'primary' inbox? You can say 'Hi!', tell us the last book you read recently, or what your favorite resource was from above.

It would also help if you add us as a contact on your mailing list, with a visual tutorial below:

We appreciate any feedback you are able to provide here. What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Feel free to reach out to us on Instagram and give us a follow there, tag your friends on our posts, and please forward this newsletter along to anyone else who would enjoy it.

Disclaimer: Becket U is an Amazon Associate and purchases through Amazon links may earn a small affiliate commission, but the price is the same for you. We only recommend books we love and think you would love, too.

Always wishing you the best,

J.B.

Becket U

Undiscovered #060: Restoring the Ability to Walk, Bigger Than Going Viral, Handwriting Increases Brain Connectivity

#060: Restoring the Ability to Walk, Bigger Than Going Viral, Handwriting Increases Brain Connectivity

Restoring the Ability to Walk

The Perplexity of the Academic World

Something Worth More Than Going Viral

Handwriting Leads to Brain Connectivity

The Math Academy Way - Condensed

Undiscovered #062: Roadmap to Making Real Friendships, Build Your Dream App in 2025, Story About a Contractor

Undiscovered #061: Multiverse Theory Confirmed?, iPod Classic Emulator, Science of Short-Form Attention

Undiscovered #059: Last 25 Years in Review, Don't Die From Heart Disease, "When Will I Ever Need to Use This?"