One aspect the article doesn't mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing.
As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world.
This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest that I was listening to a particular passage in the book - and vice versa - going back in memory to a particular location immediately makes me start hearing memories from the book passages I listened to in that location!
I think this aspect is at play a lot with handwriting as well. You are always writing in tangible places inside a notebook, while when typing things on the computer there is less of an immediate spatial location of each note. In any case that location will both be mostly the same for all notes (you sitting at the computer), and regarding any virtual spatiality of you computer desktop system, that will have a less tangible connection with your senses, (although any sense of spatiality surely can help a bit).
Spatiality, that's it. It really seems to make a tremendous difference for me to know where something is written down, and sometimes even remembering doing it. I always felt that doing it on a computer was indeed too abstract, losing that spatiality.
I also agree with the audiobook thing. For example, I recently thought back to a passage in an audiobook I enjoyed... and my mind instantly visualized how I was standing in front of the washing machine, doing laundry, while I listened to it.
A weird thing though is that some concepts and topics in my mind bring up images of locations that have nothing to do with the topic itself, and as far as I can tell don't match up in time. For example, one recent rather abstract concept is associated with the parking lot of my old school seen from a certain angle--many many years earlier.
I imagine that in those cases I might have been thinking about both the old school and the abstract concept at somewhat the same time, and they got associated from then on.
I suspect that this effect has something to do with why I can search a book faster for some non-indexed thing I've previously read in it if it is a physical book than I can if it is an ebook.
The physical book is 3D. As I progress through the book the stack of pages on my left grows and the stack on my right shrinks, giving a sense of moving through something physical. And as I alternate pages I'm first looking to one side than the other.
And so when I'm later wanting to look up something, my memory of that thing has associated with it a memory of the feel of the book at that point and what side I was looking at, and that gives me a sense of where to start looking.
During the pandemic, I have been listening to audiobooks while I’m programming. I don’t really listen to the content, it just makes me feel less lonely.
But what I’ve found is that I end up associating code I’m writing to the audiobook I’m listening to at the time. Later on, when I work on that bit of code again, I replay the audiobook I was listening to when I wrote it, and it helps me remember how that code works.
Very interesting! In college, I strongly experienced the phenomena of taking a test and not being able to remember the exact content, but could accurately remember the layout of the page that the data was on.
I also got into the habit of creating 1 or 2 page cheat sheets for tests, whether I could use them in the test or not, and the spatial organization of the data seemed to correlate very directly with my ability to process and absorb the data.
I read the game of thrones novels ages ago in pulp paperback and tried to read the fifth one as an ebook and I simply could not keep track of the various character story lines, names, etc. that I had no problem with while reading the physical books.
I'm very sure that just remembering how much of the book was in my left hand and how much in the right was extremely valuable in helping me remember - basically having an additional dimension recorded in my memory made it much easier.
> I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest that I was listening to a particular passage in the book - and vice versa
I've experienced the same thing. I sometimes relisten to podcasts and specific lines in the podcast bring back the place where I was physically when I heard the line for the first time. Like "Oh I was walking down this part of that street around 7pm 2 years ago when I heard this for the first time". I don't think that I have experienced it in reverse though.
I recall hearing about one contestants strategy for recalling the most digits of pi using this technique. He said he'd imagine a room with many objects in it. He'd assign 100 digits on the light switch, 100 digits on the top drawer, then the next drawer, and so on until reciting was just a matter of walking around the room in his mind and reading off the numbers from the objects in the correct order.
This is the reason why it drives me nuts when Apple Book randomly chooses to shift the content of the pages of the eBook. Content that was on odd page number starts appearing on even page number. This is also the reason why I never change the font size.
(Please let me know if there is a way to disable this.)
Another memorisation aid I accidentally observed was with using different pens/inks for note taking.
I started taking an minor interest in different pens at some point, and have about a dozen pens I switch between
(a mix of cheap fountain pens and rollerballs mostly).
I found that I started remembering which pen or which colour ink I wrote certain things with, it seemed to add yet another memory link to whatever I was writing.
One outcome of that is vicious hier(5) wars - everyone has a particular hierarchy of folders that "makes obvious sense" to them, mostly I suspect because of spatiality.
It would be like someone moving the rooms in your house.
I'm actually curious about this point. I wonder about the actual environmental comparison between, say, going through 3-4 notebooks a year vs. a tablet with a 3-5 year span. A notebook "costs" trees, and in theory is use-once and disposeable, but it's biodegradable, the ingredients are relatively easily accessible, and the manufacturing process is pretty refined by now. A tablet, on the other hand, has a whole world of exotic and toxic materials and manufacturing, doesn't break down nearly as cleanly in the end, and costs energy along the way...
Not to mention paper has a recycling rate of ~68%! [1]
I'm just not sure if more energy is consumed by (1) a computer/tablet using a word processor or (2) manufacturing and recycling the equivalent amount of paper.
Then there's also the matter of what type of electricity is used to power the computer or manufacture/recycle the paper (eg. hydroelectric, natural gas, etc).
Wish there was a way to track all of this...
Not exactly the same, but I did some research a while ago on the environmental impact of ereaders vs paper books. They're actually quite close, though it depends on how much you read; the overall impact of the ereader is ~100-140x that of a single paper book. A full-on tablet is probably worse, as the display is more expensive to manufacture.
Check out rocketbooks. It's erasable notebook basically. I don't use the scan feature but they have the option to have an app, take a pic and get it categorized.
I usually just need something written down for a few days/weeks as I work on projects and don't need it anymore.
This is one of the reasons I've started to use the reMarkable tablet for taking notes. Sometimes I don't even look at them again, it's just a more efficient way to get the info into my head.
The only thing that bothers me is the time it takes to flip between pages and find something you know you wrote somewhere but forgot exactly where you wrote it. Somehow manual searching is still faster with real paper.
I think this post just barely misses the main reason which, in my opinion, makes writing a better medium for remembering. They mention that typing is faster and easier than writing but I think the real reason this impacts memory is because you have to reduce things into their smallest form in order to keep up (with the person speaking or your own thoughts). This act of condensing makes you internalize the words into concepts, and concepts are easier to recall.
When I was just starting my current startup (a collaborative note-taking platform), I pored over a lot of studies on this subject because I wanted to make sure that if I was going to build a digital knowledge base / note-taking solution I would give our users their best shot at actually remembering what they were storing.
In the end, your theory did seem to be the most frequently validated rationalization when it came to discrepancies between handwritten and typed notes.
As you say, unless you can write in shorthand very few people are capable of writing at the speed of speech / thought, where as many people can easily type that fast. This requires you to be more thoughtful about what and how you record things with pen and paper, meaning you synthesize / summarize / compartmentalize the information as you go.
This was sometimes compounded in environments involving a presentation / lecture slides, as digital note-takers frequently have a copy of the relevant presentation on their device, further reducing the amount of content they feel they need to record in some way and therefore reducing the amount of information synthesis that is happening.
The best idea I could come up with to help encourage handwritten-like behavior when recording info on a computer was to move away from the document/bullet-point format and towards a "digital notecard" format, which encourages you to think about ideas as compartmentalized / discrete ideas rather than a thoughtless information dump. So that's what I built.
But if you or anyone else has any good ideas about how to emulate the benefits of pen-and-paper on digital, I'm all ears!
I never knew why I unconsciously chose analog over digital in those cases, but it turns out there's a scientific explanation. When we write, we make our brains go through an abstraction process - separating something from a whole to analyze it by itself.- According to neurologist Audrey Van Der Meer, "It seems that keyboards and pens bring into play different underlying neurological processes. This may not be surprising since handwriting/drawing is a complex task that requires the integration of various skills."
I wrote a full article about it in the link above.
Every time this topic comes up, I am curious to see a cross-generational study.
I'd also be interested in seeing the result of taking notes with a less linear note taking tool, such as OneNote and its infinite canvas, compared to pure linear note taking.
Now for most math classes, and other subjects that involve lots of diagrams, hand writing (digital or analog) is better! (Ignoring the people who are so good at LaTeX they can do complex math equations)
IMHO the largest issue with modern teaching is the use of slides. I was going to college just as the transition to PowerPoint was happening, and wow was the degradation in quality of teaching noticeable.
One of my profs, whose class I had a low opinion of, used slides for all his lectures. One day the projector broke down and he had to teach on the chalk board. It was amazing! The quality of his lecture improved dramatically when he was able to go back and make changes to past diagrams, or change examples on the fly to dive deeper into something the students had difficulty grasping.
The other problem with PowerPoint is that it goes by faster than students can take notes! If the prof and the students are both writing notes, they are on (mostly) equal ground, ignoring that profs have decades of experience writing quickly.
> This cognitive effort of condensing and translating into your own words is what facilitates learning. Which is why you could still do this with typing, but it's easy to avoid the cognitive effort of translating and condensing (and we tend toward cognitive laziness) and just type it verbatim because you can keep up.
When I type notes (all the way back to college), it is in one ear, out the other (onto the page). The act of physically writing it down, and potentially a second pass to clean up the notes, is almost all I ever need to get something into working memory. Back in college, the third time I would look at my notes would be the morning of the test where I would just glance through them. Seeing the general shape of the text was often enough to trigger the recall.
If there's something that I'm obsessing over or simply cannot get off my mind, I can write it down and it will go away. Throwing the piece of paper is optional.
I think writing puts some kind of structure to your mental model, you process it at the time of writing and can move on to the next thing while preserving the output of the processing. The output tends to be some kind of map about where you can find it and short description about the nature of the thing you write down.
It's almost as if you put the stuff of your "hot memory", the memory that is about the main process you operate on, into your visual memory.
For some reason, typing on a computer doesn't have the same effect. It does have some effect but it's different.
Something I've learned is that if you're a disorganized person, you're going to have a disorganized computer, and disorganized notes. But with physical notes, I can put them in a physical pile, and they'll pretty much stay there until I need them, sometimes for years.
Once in a while I can go through them and throw away the ones that I really don't care about, and I can transfer really vital stuff to the computer. Scanning is easy. My cell phone is a good enough scanner.
Where paper shines is equations and drawings. I'm building an elaborate electronic circuit as a hobby project right now. The ease of drawing the schematics by hand outpaces any drawing program, and it's effortless to carry paper into my workshop. Of all places, Target sells a lovely quad ruled notebook where one side of each sheet is 4 grids per inch, and the other side 5.
Now I've read a lot of comments and articles about pens. Uggh. Pens are just not my friend. I've struck a blow for freedom and bought pencils. There, I said it. Lots of them. I know all the cool kids write with pens, but my handwriting is so horrible, I usually have to erase my worst scribbles and start over quite frequently.
Hey, don't let the fountain pen hipsters [1] get you down. The point is what you're writing, not what you're writing it with.
[1] To whom it may: If reading the phrase "fountain pen hipster" has upset you, you may be interested to know that I EDC a Pilot Decimo in lavender with a lightly custom-ground F nib, which right now is inked with Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu from a cartridge I filled myself. We're the same, it's whatever, chill, you don't have to take the existence of fountain pen hipsters or a mention of same as a personal attack, it isn't one. Unless you're out there being a jerk to people who use different kinds of writing tools, in which case we aren't the same and you should stop.
Bit of a life-hack I picked up awhile ago is to "write the notes by hand, then type them out later".
This has a few advantages. First, you basically get all the benefits listed in this article. Second, you get the advantage of repetition, and possibly correcting errors in your handwritten notes. Last, you have pretty notes to read off of later if you need to study for something, which is useful.
Yeah I do this for anything that's both important and complicated - it can be a slow process for me, but when typing things up I'll usually end up further refining my thoughts and coming up with new ideas, in addition to the benefits you mentioned.
Although my handwriting is also hilariously bad, so it's kind of necessary for anything I anticipate needing to closely review in the future.
Funny, I did the opposite for bar exam prep. I took notes on the computer like a machine so I didn't miss anything, then I reformatted them afterward. After that, I hand-wrote them. By the end, they were pretty much memorized.
I have a really hard time writing down notes while things are going on. I have very good memory but if I'm taking notes while something is happening, I often don't remember anything other than writing it down. If I don't take notes, my memory of events, topics and discussions is often far better. Writing things down post facto also does not help me much, other than I know where I wrote it.
However I find the act of discussing a topic helps cement things. For me, the engagement with a subject is what really helps me remember things, and I suspect writing notes removes that.
I think there's a critical element missing from these experiments: transcribing information vs storing knowledge.
When you're transcribing things (writing down as you hear or see it), you're normally not involved in learning or remembering the information; merely writing it down. In this case, handwriting would help to remember it later since writing on autopilot a more involved process than typing on autopilot.
HOWEVER, when it comes to writing down KNOWLEDGE, it's a very different experience. This is why I always advocate to think before you type, and why less than 10% of my time spent developing software involves actually touching the keys on my keyboard. A live coding session with me would be extremely boring; 10 minutes of me staring into space, followed by 1 minute of dumping the code into the source file. But I'm very productive; my projects on github, sourceforge and sunsite speak for themselves.
From the point that I entered college onwards, I've barely handwritten a paragraph of text per year (going on 25 years). I noticed no difference in cognition or memory then, nor do I now. Re-reading things I've typed in the past bring the whole experience flooding back the same as is expressed in the article as a handwriting experience. But then again, I'm not transcribing; I'm writing down knowledge.
The Brain That Changes Itself. Life changing book. One of the surprising studies there shows how kids with all kinds of learning disabilities can be radically transformed just by being given cursive handwriting exercises. Brain development and activation under handwriting is measurable, and very different from typing or even printing.
One thing that stuck with me from that book was the notion that the fine motor control gained through the rote learning of handwriting might carry over into verbal fluency. iirc it was a speculative point in the book, and I wonder if that has been any research into it since then. It partly inspired me to relearn cursive as an adult using the Getty-Dubay italic.
I find typing perfectly adequate for remembering things - in school if I was copying out notes I did just as well typing as handwritten, and could do it faster (and so get more repetition in) on a computer. Both blew away just reading or listening passively.
However, for brainstorming or planning, which is a lot of what this article is talking about, the unbounded spatial component of paper (or a drawing app with stylus) is much better for me than the constrained nature of a word processor. Something like graphviz isn't bad for certain types of things, but anything that relies on mouse-based selection and dragging of things breaks my flow in a way that jotting a new note off to the edge of an open paper doesn't.
It certainly seems plausible to me, in my personal experience, but this article is talking about something that may be true.
This is another headline that is planting an idea in casual reader’s heads without explicitly mentioning it is in large part anecdotal and speculative.
Anyone interested in writing faster and with less hand strain should look into fountain pens. With a quality nib, that doesn't scratch/catch the paper one can continuously write for hours at decent speed. I usually do the first draft of anything I need to write by hand with a fountain pen as it allows me to get out my thoughts without the distractions of editing. You can cross out your work, but it is still there to go back to, or incorporate in later edits (done at the computer). Plus you can draw out ideas that you can't immediately put into words, when words fail you.
I find hand written lists are good for focusing, but if I'm in a store hours later shopping for a group of disparate objects (10 ft ladder, size 5 2.5 inch screws, plant pot etc etc) I find a digital list invaluable because I can remove the items I have got so far leaving a shorter list.
I've found that unless I strike out items I somehow miss something on a long list. I know you can do this with a pen too but I've gone from wunderlist to the various google phone list tools and find them v useful
Yea I actually draw little squares next to my todo items, and then fill them in when I complete the task. For some reason, I find that way easier to parse than a bunch of scratched out words.
I also do that in my engineering notebooks--it makes to-dos stand out more from the rest of my notes.
This is a particular research paper on taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand, and how notes are transcribed. They conclude that longhand is better than the taking notes on laptops. Pretty popular paper.
I had a task at work today where I had to go to pen and paper first in order to get myself moving forward on it. Not exactly the point of the OP, but it was a different kind of enabling factor.
I had a web site update to do that involved a handful of different pages, with related forms and emails and so on. I had an email chain of modifications from the requestors. I was putting it off for a couple days because there were too many places to start and I needed to straighten things out in my head.
So I printed the email chain, and then with my favorite pen (Sharpie Pen) split the emails into parts and drew little blocks for each page and added bullet lists of steps to be done. Once I scribbled things out like this, I was then able to get into the editor and make the changes (Divi Builder on WordPress). And most importantly, check things off as I went along! Endorphin hits!
As I was making the content and layout adjustments, I got frustrated with the builder and clicking and dragging to change each little bit and wished for a text-mode way of making these adjustments, something above the level of HTML and CSS but below the GUI approach. So at this stage I wanted to go back to typing.
To finish up I would get into OneNote and write up the steps I did, including screen clips and links and file paths, then I will have something to search for next time I do this. So for me several forms of note taking are useful at different stages of the process. Often I will do this all in OneNote, but today I needed the physical stuff to get going!
I personally use more or less 3 stages. 1. whiteboard and marker - explore ideas, big-picture thinking, fast iterations. 2. paper notebook - things that emerged from point 1 are more precisely recorded into a paper notebook. Things go much slower here, especially because the eraser or the paper burns out quite quickly and there is no point to keep pointless notes. The structure of the paper is quite important as well. I noticed blank paper does not work that well and I spent more space there with less structure. Linked paper is also not good. Square paper is better. But the best one for me is dotted paper. Ideal compromise between structure and freedom. 3. everything that survives stage 2 goes to real code and git logs. Here the structure is maximal. Keeping notes in the code is of course good way as well as extensive git comments.
I disagree. Writing is helpful for thinking things through, but the writing itself doesn’t do anything. I used to take a lot of notes to remember things and it can just act as an excuse to not think hard. It’s the hard thought and periodic review that cements things
As I elaborated in another comment, not just the act of writing things down, but the actual very visual recollection of how I wrote it down and where on the page I did helps a lot. I don't know why it works that way, but it definitely does.
[+] [-] samuell|5 years ago|reply
As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world.
This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest that I was listening to a particular passage in the book - and vice versa - going back in memory to a particular location immediately makes me start hearing memories from the book passages I listened to in that location!
I think this aspect is at play a lot with handwriting as well. You are always writing in tangible places inside a notebook, while when typing things on the computer there is less of an immediate spatial location of each note. In any case that location will both be mostly the same for all notes (you sitting at the computer), and regarding any virtual spatiality of you computer desktop system, that will have a less tangible connection with your senses, (although any sense of spatiality surely can help a bit).
[+] [-] anyfoo|5 years ago|reply
I also agree with the audiobook thing. For example, I recently thought back to a passage in an audiobook I enjoyed... and my mind instantly visualized how I was standing in front of the washing machine, doing laundry, while I listened to it.
A weird thing though is that some concepts and topics in my mind bring up images of locations that have nothing to do with the topic itself, and as far as I can tell don't match up in time. For example, one recent rather abstract concept is associated with the parking lot of my old school seen from a certain angle--many many years earlier.
I imagine that in those cases I might have been thinking about both the old school and the abstract concept at somewhat the same time, and they got associated from then on.
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
The physical book is 3D. As I progress through the book the stack of pages on my left grows and the stack on my right shrinks, giving a sense of moving through something physical. And as I alternate pages I'm first looking to one side than the other.
And so when I'm later wanting to look up something, my memory of that thing has associated with it a memory of the feel of the book at that point and what side I was looking at, and that gives me a sense of where to start looking.
[+] [-] cameronh90|5 years ago|reply
But what I’ve found is that I end up associating code I’m writing to the audiobook I’m listening to at the time. Later on, when I work on that bit of code again, I replay the audiobook I was listening to when I wrote it, and it helps me remember how that code works.
[+] [-] fatnoah|5 years ago|reply
I also got into the habit of creating 1 or 2 page cheat sheets for tests, whether I could use them in the test or not, and the spatial organization of the data seemed to correlate very directly with my ability to process and absorb the data.
[+] [-] eric_h|5 years ago|reply
I'm very sure that just remembering how much of the book was in my left hand and how much in the right was extremely valuable in helping me remember - basically having an additional dimension recorded in my memory made it much easier.
[+] [-] beforeolives|5 years ago|reply
I've experienced the same thing. I sometimes relisten to podcasts and specific lines in the podcast bring back the place where I was physically when I heard the line for the first time. Like "Oh I was walking down this part of that street around 7pm 2 years ago when I heard this for the first time". I don't think that I have experienced it in reverse though.
[+] [-] 1980phipsi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuamcginnis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pagade|5 years ago|reply
(Please let me know if there is a way to disable this.)
[+] [-] suicas|5 years ago|reply
I started taking an minor interest in different pens at some point, and have about a dozen pens I switch between (a mix of cheap fountain pens and rollerballs mostly).
I found that I started remembering which pen or which colour ink I wrote certain things with, it seemed to add yet another memory link to whatever I was writing.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
It would be like someone moving the rooms in your house.
[+] [-] bennysonething|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ycombinete|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roughly|5 years ago|reply
I'm actually curious about this point. I wonder about the actual environmental comparison between, say, going through 3-4 notebooks a year vs. a tablet with a 3-5 year span. A notebook "costs" trees, and in theory is use-once and disposeable, but it's biodegradable, the ingredients are relatively easily accessible, and the manufacturing process is pretty refined by now. A tablet, on the other hand, has a whole world of exotic and toxic materials and manufacturing, doesn't break down nearly as cleanly in the end, and costs energy along the way...
[+] [-] dan-robertson|5 years ago|reply
One other thing is that putting paper into landfill can be a form of medium-term carbon sequestration.
[+] [-] misterkrabs|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
[+] [-] moonchild|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fma|5 years ago|reply
I usually just need something written down for a few days/weeks as I work on projects and don't need it anymore.
[+] [-] briandoll|5 years ago|reply
I wrote more about my current workflow/stack here if anyone is interested (w/ some reMarkable hacks): https://briandoll.medium.com/personal-setup-for-getting-shit...
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
The only thing that bothers me is the time it takes to flip between pages and find something you know you wrote somewhere but forgot exactly where you wrote it. Somehow manual searching is still faster with real paper.
[+] [-] abduhl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastball|5 years ago|reply
In the end, your theory did seem to be the most frequently validated rationalization when it came to discrepancies between handwritten and typed notes.
As you say, unless you can write in shorthand very few people are capable of writing at the speed of speech / thought, where as many people can easily type that fast. This requires you to be more thoughtful about what and how you record things with pen and paper, meaning you synthesize / summarize / compartmentalize the information as you go.
This was sometimes compounded in environments involving a presentation / lecture slides, as digital note-takers frequently have a copy of the relevant presentation on their device, further reducing the amount of content they feel they need to record in some way and therefore reducing the amount of information synthesis that is happening.
The best idea I could come up with to help encourage handwritten-like behavior when recording info on a computer was to move away from the document/bullet-point format and towards a "digital notecard" format, which encourages you to think about ideas as compartmentalized / discrete ideas rather than a thoughtless information dump. So that's what I built.
But if you or anyone else has any good ideas about how to emulate the benefits of pen-and-paper on digital, I'm all ears!
[+] [-] pgcm1|5 years ago|reply
I wrote a full article about it in the link above.
[+] [-] com2kid|5 years ago|reply
I'd also be interested in seeing the result of taking notes with a less linear note taking tool, such as OneNote and its infinite canvas, compared to pure linear note taking.
Now for most math classes, and other subjects that involve lots of diagrams, hand writing (digital or analog) is better! (Ignoring the people who are so good at LaTeX they can do complex math equations)
IMHO the largest issue with modern teaching is the use of slides. I was going to college just as the transition to PowerPoint was happening, and wow was the degradation in quality of teaching noticeable.
One of my profs, whose class I had a low opinion of, used slides for all his lectures. One day the projector broke down and he had to teach on the chalk board. It was amazing! The quality of his lecture improved dramatically when he was able to go back and make changes to past diagrams, or change examples on the fly to dive deeper into something the students had difficulty grasping.
The other problem with PowerPoint is that it goes by faster than students can take notes! If the prof and the students are both writing notes, they are on (mostly) equal ground, ignoring that profs have decades of experience writing quickly.
[+] [-] sethammons|5 years ago|reply
> This cognitive effort of condensing and translating into your own words is what facilitates learning. Which is why you could still do this with typing, but it's easy to avoid the cognitive effort of translating and condensing (and we tend toward cognitive laziness) and just type it verbatim because you can keep up.
When I type notes (all the way back to college), it is in one ear, out the other (onto the page). The act of physically writing it down, and potentially a second pass to clean up the notes, is almost all I ever need to get something into working memory. Back in college, the third time I would look at my notes would be the morning of the test where I would just glance through them. Seeing the general shape of the text was often enough to trigger the recall.
[+] [-] mrtksn|5 years ago|reply
If there's something that I'm obsessing over or simply cannot get off my mind, I can write it down and it will go away. Throwing the piece of paper is optional.
I think writing puts some kind of structure to your mental model, you process it at the time of writing and can move on to the next thing while preserving the output of the processing. The output tends to be some kind of map about where you can find it and short description about the nature of the thing you write down.
It's almost as if you put the stuff of your "hot memory", the memory that is about the main process you operate on, into your visual memory.
For some reason, typing on a computer doesn't have the same effect. It does have some effect but it's different.
[+] [-] analog31|5 years ago|reply
Once in a while I can go through them and throw away the ones that I really don't care about, and I can transfer really vital stuff to the computer. Scanning is easy. My cell phone is a good enough scanner.
Where paper shines is equations and drawings. I'm building an elaborate electronic circuit as a hobby project right now. The ease of drawing the schematics by hand outpaces any drawing program, and it's effortless to carry paper into my workshop. Of all places, Target sells a lovely quad ruled notebook where one side of each sheet is 4 grids per inch, and the other side 5.
Now I've read a lot of comments and articles about pens. Uggh. Pens are just not my friend. I've struck a blow for freedom and bought pencils. There, I said it. Lots of them. I know all the cool kids write with pens, but my handwriting is so horrible, I usually have to erase my worst scribbles and start over quite frequently.
[+] [-] throwanem|5 years ago|reply
[1] To whom it may: If reading the phrase "fountain pen hipster" has upset you, you may be interested to know that I EDC a Pilot Decimo in lavender with a lightly custom-ground F nib, which right now is inked with Iroshizuku Murasaki-shikibu from a cartridge I filled myself. We're the same, it's whatever, chill, you don't have to take the existence of fountain pen hipsters or a mention of same as a personal attack, it isn't one. Unless you're out there being a jerk to people who use different kinds of writing tools, in which case we aren't the same and you should stop.
[+] [-] tombert|5 years ago|reply
This has a few advantages. First, you basically get all the benefits listed in this article. Second, you get the advantage of repetition, and possibly correcting errors in your handwritten notes. Last, you have pretty notes to read off of later if you need to study for something, which is useful.
[+] [-] caddemon|5 years ago|reply
Although my handwriting is also hilariously bad, so it's kind of necessary for anything I anticipate needing to closely review in the future.
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagmx|5 years ago|reply
However I find the act of discussing a topic helps cement things. For me, the engagement with a subject is what really helps me remember things, and I suspect writing notes removes that.
[+] [-] kstenerud|5 years ago|reply
When you're transcribing things (writing down as you hear or see it), you're normally not involved in learning or remembering the information; merely writing it down. In this case, handwriting would help to remember it later since writing on autopilot a more involved process than typing on autopilot.
HOWEVER, when it comes to writing down KNOWLEDGE, it's a very different experience. This is why I always advocate to think before you type, and why less than 10% of my time spent developing software involves actually touching the keys on my keyboard. A live coding session with me would be extremely boring; 10 minutes of me staring into space, followed by 1 minute of dumping the code into the source file. But I'm very productive; my projects on github, sourceforge and sunsite speak for themselves.
From the point that I entered college onwards, I've barely handwritten a paragraph of text per year (going on 25 years). I noticed no difference in cognition or memory then, nor do I now. Re-reading things I've typed in the past bring the whole experience flooding back the same as is expressed in the article as a handwriting experience. But then again, I'm not transcribing; I'm writing down knowledge.
[+] [-] _xnmw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krrrh|5 years ago|reply
https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/
[+] [-] majormajor|5 years ago|reply
However, for brainstorming or planning, which is a lot of what this article is talking about, the unbounded spatial component of paper (or a drawing app with stylus) is much better for me than the constrained nature of a word processor. Something like graphviz isn't bad for certain types of things, but anything that relies on mouse-based selection and dragging of things breaks my flow in a way that jotting a new note off to the edge of an open paper doesn't.
[+] [-] whiddershins|5 years ago|reply
It certainly seems plausible to me, in my personal experience, but this article is talking about something that may be true.
This is another headline that is planting an idea in casual reader’s heads without explicitly mentioning it is in large part anecdotal and speculative.
[+] [-] nanomonkey|5 years ago|reply
Some gel point pens are equally comfortable.
[+] [-] olivermarks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradstewart|5 years ago|reply
I also do that in my engineering notebooks--it makes to-dos stand out more from the rest of my notes.
[+] [-] catchmeifyoucan|5 years ago|reply
(The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard) [https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/Mu...]
[+] [-] yardshop|5 years ago|reply
I had a web site update to do that involved a handful of different pages, with related forms and emails and so on. I had an email chain of modifications from the requestors. I was putting it off for a couple days because there were too many places to start and I needed to straighten things out in my head.
So I printed the email chain, and then with my favorite pen (Sharpie Pen) split the emails into parts and drew little blocks for each page and added bullet lists of steps to be done. Once I scribbled things out like this, I was then able to get into the editor and make the changes (Divi Builder on WordPress). And most importantly, check things off as I went along! Endorphin hits!
As I was making the content and layout adjustments, I got frustrated with the builder and clicking and dragging to change each little bit and wished for a text-mode way of making these adjustments, something above the level of HTML and CSS but below the GUI approach. So at this stage I wanted to go back to typing.
To finish up I would get into OneNote and write up the steps I did, including screen clips and links and file paths, then I will have something to search for next time I do this. So for me several forms of note taking are useful at different stages of the process. Often I will do this all in OneNote, but today I needed the physical stuff to get going!
[+] [-] kalal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gentleman11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anyfoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _rpd|5 years ago|reply