r/artistsWay

Hiii all!! I am taking part in the artists way journey and have been actually loving it despite it being challenging. I was fortunate enough to be presented a cluster which has helped but thinking ahead I want to get my cluster something small and something similar to the yoga namaste “the light in me also sees the light in you.”

Does anyone have any ideas? I know there’s a section in the appendix that talks about how clusters are meant to be supportive, so how could I show that with a parting gift. Thinking ahead bc I want to make sure I utilize a small business if possible ☺️

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.

Im 6 weeks in an loving the main book. I rented it from the library, but now I plan to buy it after i finish. That got me thinking if i should buy the workbook as well.

its kinda unclear online what the workbook actually is and how it differs from the main book. Any insight is appreciated!

I'm currently starting week 3, but I've been sitting with Cameron's Basic Principles list for a bit and not loving how I feel when I return to it. I'm mostly agnostic with a touch of woo in the "creativity is magic, actually" way, and I really wasn't enjoying the god talk in what I'm supposed to read daily.

So I adapted it! Hopefully this resonates with y'all who feel the same about the God and Creator talk in the book.

1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure, creative energy.

2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life—including ourselves.

3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the lineage of creativity that exists within us at the core of our being.

4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.

5. Creativity is a fundamental trait of humanity; to be human is to be creative and innovative. Using our creativity is putting our creativity back into humanity, back into the world.

6. The refusal to be creative is a denial of our potential and is counter to our best interests.

7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to the millennia of creative history and evolution that came before us and the lessons we can learn from our ancestors.

8. As we open our creative channel to our core selves, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.

9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.

10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from an innate drive at the core of our being. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our purpose.

I am interested in starting a 12-week in-person Artist's Way Group in Fremont, CA starting in July 2026, using Julia Cameron's book exercises. I'm looking for 3-5 others who are interested in going through this with me. If you are interested, you can reach me at bfkmeyers@gmail.com . Barbara Meyers

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I literally carcked open The Artist's Way yesterday and have been going through the biggest creative block / existential criss after a bunch of career and relationship changes. It feels like exactly what I need. Anyway, I understand the Morning Pages and did my first this morning. As far as the Artist's Date, I was not entirely clear by the explanation and there were only a few examples...

Is the goal to do something that creatively fuels you for two hours/week?

Or is the goal to have two hours where you are "doing something" where you have time to reflect?

My gut says the former but her examples sounded more like the latter.

Some of the ideas I had initially aren't necessarily the most peaceful to begin with (producing a song, making a dj mix, watching films) compared with the examples of like going to a museum or sculpting something.

I didn't want to research too much online out of fear of sort of spoiling the rest of the book so was wondering what people on here thought? Is it more important to spend those two hours doing something creatively fulfilling or to spend those two hours doing something where I find I can be more reflective?

A wild concept, I know.

I’m on Chapter 11, and I’m feeling a little empty creatively. It feels like I need a break from thinking about creativity and art all the time. I think writing morning pages is getting out all my creative energy and thoughts leaving my creative well empty.

It also feels like I’m using the Artist’s Way as an excuse not to be creative. Like a crutch or distraction similar to being on my phone or reading or watching T.V. I’m doing all the tasks and morning pages and week/month/year plans instead of being creative.

Has anyone else experienced this?

I completed about half of the Artists Way - and then I stopped due to a personal tragedy during which I was unable to continue. Now that life has mellowed out a bit and am sort of back to a routine, I was wondering if you all think I should RESTART the Artists Way completely or if I should simply pick up where I left off?

What do you guys think would be more beneficial for my growth as an Artist?

Thanks!

Hey yall,

I have been doing the artists way since december and am only in week 5- I know it sounds insane lol. But I kept starting some weeks over and over and over (especially week four- I could not stay away from social media) and sometimes I forgot to do the tasks all together. But the one thing I have kept up RELIGIOUSLY is the morning pages. Even when I slacked off or felt bad for not doing all the tasks or not doing a week perfectly, I kept doing those morning pages. I now have a full journal and am now halfway through my second one. I still go back and forth with whether I like them but they have absolutely changed my outlook on life and working thru my anxiety around art and money.

My question for the group is do you think I should start all the way over? This week I am trying to really buckle down and get thru the rest of the process. I like this week bc I love collaging so visioning has been easy for me.

Thoughts???

I've been fairly consistent with the morning pages lately, and also managed to complete a few of the exercises until week 3, but in a couple weeks from now I'll be moving back to my parents' house from University for summer. I feel that I won't have the same privacy there in my house to do the morning pages or the exercises, cuz in some way or another my parents are in some way shape or form a censor to my artist child or brain. I could use a substitute like the notes app on my phone for the morning pages, but for the exercises I feel that I need some place to sit in where I can gather my thoughts peacefully, I know I could use a quiet public space like a library, but unfortunately I live in a developing country and there aren't any libraries that I know of near my parents' house.

How can I work my way around this??

Should I just abandon the course entirely and start over again once I return to uni??

(P.S - I feel that this isn't really an option for me cuz I want to pursue content creation and the more I delay this discovery process the longer I have to keep my creative ventures waiting, starting over would mean losing 3 weeks of progress)

Should I just read the book on my phone without doing the exercises?? (That would prolly be the wrong way to do it and I fear that someday if I decide to come back to doing it all over again, it won't be as effective or as fun as doing it properly for the first time would be)