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Comment by rcthompson | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the actual learning secret is "don't take verbatim notes", and the only relevance of the laptop is that it makes it much easier to take verbatim notes. I've pretty much only ever taken notes with a laptop, but I always take notes in the "digest and summarize" style, never recording the speaker's words verbatim, and it's worked great for me. (It wasn't a conscious decision; it's just how I take notes.)

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It's not just the verbatim aspect, part of the issue actually is the distinction between laptop and paper. When you hand write notes, another piece of information you store in your mind is where on the page you wrote it, and what it looks like. Then, when you need to recall, you can often remember where it was on the page and generally what it looked like there, and that can help remember the actual content.

Why would those factors be any different when taking notes on a laptop? It is still on the screen/document somewhere, and it still looks like something.

The problem is that word processors and word wrap make it too easy to move text, destroying the absolute and sometimes even relative position.

Much of human memory evolved to remember locations, and almost all of the top memory competitors use locality association ("Memory Palace"/loci) as their primary method.

If that were true, then typing would be vastly superior to handwriting for everyone who simply chose not to copy-paste.

> Sounds like the actual learning secret is "don't take verbatim notes", and the only relevance of the laptop is that it makes it much easier to take verbatim notes.

Yes, that's pretty much what it explains. The title "don't take notes with a laptop" is rather misleading. It's a well known fact that summarizing requires the learner's brain to actively process the information, as opposed to passively receiving information and copying. It wouldn't surprise me if summarizing on a laptop leads to better outcomes than using handwriting, as more cognitive resources would be available to process the information (rather than frantically writing).

> It wouldn't surprise me if summarizing on a laptop leads to better outcomes than using handwriting, as more cognitive resources would be available to process the information (rather than frantically writing)

Q: Why should "frantically writing" be worse than - say - frantically typing?

It's not, but most people (or at least, most people who grew up with computers) can type faster than they can write, so the operative comparison is between frantically writing and typing at a comfortable pace.

I've never taken notes on a laptop. For those who do, are you typing every single word that the speaker says?

I've taken notes on paper during many, many talks. I don't write down every word that's spoken.

Isn't the cognitive load likely due to to deciding what content to record, not due to controlling the brain-hand-pencil-paper interface / brain-hands-keyboard interface (as it were)?

I take notes on a laptop for school and what I have learned is it is very valuable to reorganize notes after readings or lectures. My goal is always to make a document that I can review later that is structured. Restructuring online without rewriting entire pages is pretty efficient. Also, with some discipline you can tag sections and grep them later.

A disadvantage over writing is not having multiple columns if you are using plain text. Tools like onenote solve this, but I find it too distracting to use in general.

The article is saying that typing the speaker's words verbatim is exactly what most people do when taking notes on a laptop, even when they are explicitly warned that it's a bad idea, whereas it's generally not possible to do so when writing notes, without some kind of shorthand.

In any case, that's not the point: regardless of what text you decide to record in your notes, it's faster to do so by typing it than writing it for most people. That means that if you switch from writing to typing your notes but continue taking notes in the same style, you should in theory have more time to figure out what to write without falling behind the speaker or needing to rush your typing.

Your notion of cognitive resources is most likely very different from your brain's.

As I recall, all the evidence shows that handwriting rather than typing - even when using similar strategies - has better recall. When writing, you can more easily draw diagrams, do very quick sketches, add arrows and links back to other parts of the text, etc. In short, you have more ways of contexualizing the notes and representing them in a spatial way, giving your brain another 'hook' to help remember them.

> Your notion of cognitive resources is most likely very different from your brain's.

In this context, I disagree. If the act of writing is using most of my attention, I will miss large amounts of what is being said.

> As I recall, all the evidence shows that handwriting rather than typing - even when using similar strategies - has better recall.

I believe this is a highly nuanced issue and it's hard to make blanket statements. For example, I can't see how it would apply to people with various degrees of dyslexia - which could be up to 20% of the population. Having said that, I'd be interested to see evidence that proves otherwise.

I think “frantically writing” is the wrong way of looking at it. It implies the mental systems that control the complex process of handwriting could easily be reapplied to ‘listening and comprehending’ if only they could be freed from their task. This seems unlikely to me, having read a few studies demonstrating that doodling can improve focus, especially in people diagnosed with ADHD – it seems like our dexterity control systems can actually be a source of frustration and distraction if they’re not given something to do. In my own anecdata, engaging my hands in writing the actual information I’m trying to learn works even better than doodling. I see it as rallying the different parts of my brain to work together to maximise focus and cognition on one target, while doodling is more like giving a kid a toy to shut them up. I might be reaching though.

You make some valid points, and physically writing may indeed be helpful to particular cohorts. But for people like myself, who are slow writers and poor multitaskers, the act of physically writing takes attention away from the act of listening, meaning that I miss a lot of information. The core issue is that we all have different strengths and weaknesses, which is why there is no such thing as "one size fits all" when it comes to learning.

No.

Learning is very much a multi-sensory process. The act of writing is part of the learning - the two-dimensional shapes your fingers trace actually help cement the memory in your brain. (And no, simply clacking away on the keyboard is not the same.) As these authors [1] say: "the additional context provided by the complex task of writing results in better memory."

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/154193120905302...

The study you've referenced is invalid for this particular discussion (but it's an interesting read and thank you for posting it). The study is focused on memorizing words, with this limitation being clearly stated in the study: "Future research is necessary to investigate the effect typing has on remember more complex stimuli, for example, phrases rather than just words."

It's also notable that the participants are 72% percent female (females as a population are better at writing than males [1]), and that 72% of participants admit that they prefer pen and paper.

Having said that, I agree with the study in that the kinesthetic aspect of writing will generally lead to better retention of words - I believe this is well established.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180920102135.h...

It is also something else: if you take a paper note you have to actively archive it in some way at which point you might come into contact with it again. Searching for a old note on paper is like browsing backwards through the history of notes.

All of that would be entirely possible with a computer, but it would result in an inconvenient interface, where you can’t just search for a word or tag.

I have tried many ways to take notes but I’ve found myself always to come back to simple text/markdown files and paper based notebooks.

I manually type the relevant paper notes into the computer to make them searchable and link back to the notebook (e.g. like 2019/01 P.92) if I like to revisit the full note with drawings and all.

This means your notebook should get a name and a date and you should use notebooks with pagination..

I suppose in this day and age, with OCR being as good as it is, you could take a picture with your phone, and be able to search on text in the picture.

Now I think about it, I seem to recall Evernote doing something like that a while back. Mind you, I don't know how easy it is to get the meta-data back out.

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