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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

There’s a famous quote that I think is the best answer to this question: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it to remember it now.”

There’s a lot of research on this, but in short, most people develop much stronger memories of the things they physically write (typing is less effective IIRC), whether they ever refer back to the notes or not.

Your mileage may vary, but for most avid note takers, that’s the gist of it.

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Personally, I see writing as a symbolic form of “doing”: the disintegrating and reintegrating information. It’s one way to learn and remember.

At work, I find note taking to be almost useless for me personally, even though I feel like I’m learning new things each day. Although, I’ve noticed a quirk - whenever I learn something that surprises me, I feel the urge to share it out loud to my coworkers. I feel like that might take the place of writing it down?

Sometimes I feel guilty (?) about the fact that I don’t write as much any more. But, on reflection, I might have just replaced writing with orating...

Running with that idea, maybe oral conversation is an underrated ruminative method: with its great space for nuance and emphasis, and its tight feedback loop between speaker and listener. The only limits are working memory and persistence; if you’re dealing with too many interacting concepts, and your original point doesn’t stick, it’s usually gone forever. Although, maybe those are very useful filters :)

Another quote says "if you want to know how well you know something, try teaching it to someone else". As a occasional programmer and math teacher, I usually gets astonished on how much I learn when teaching "basic" stuff for students. The learning/teaching process is amazing! Now, going back to what we were talking about, writing for me is essentially teaching myself a thing I thought I knew.

EDIT: fix English

Oh I couldn't agree more, great quote. Verbalizing or writing down your thoughts absolutely crystallizes your thoughts and the act of writing is most of the benefit. But this and other articles have all these systems of tagging and organizing and other things which seems to indicate they're building out some perfect reference for later use. In my mind, the crystallization benefits of writing can be accomplished without any of the other fancy add-ons.

I also do that. I don't even keep notes because the act of writing is so powerful on helping me retain the information. So I really don't relate to all the note systems and note management. I can take any random printer paper, do my notes, and throw it out. This gives me the full use I will ever get because I have never in my entire life wanted to go back to my notes.

> There’s a lot of research on this, but in short, most people develop much stronger memories of the things they physically write (typing is less effective IIRC), whether they ever refer back to the notes or not.

Do you remember why typing would be less effective? Is it something to do with writing being much slower, therefore you have to think about it more while recording it?

> Is it something to do with writing being much slower, therefore you have to think about it more while recording it?

I am not of any importance as a person, but my hypothesis is exactly this. For most of the HN audience, I expect that typing is well within the 70-100wpm range if not more, and at that rate, it becomes much faster to get something out of one's mind and into a system that it doesn't take time to "buffer" and linger.

I somehow personally doubt that actually forming the words on paper is enough to create memories, but I suppose anything is possible given how humans have evolved so far.

I find the same experience and my guess would be the amount of engagement. A good typist can type while having a conversation. Writing demands more focus and coordination and gives more feedback.

If I remember right, the idea is that writing on paper has several kinesthetic properties: the feel of the pen and the paper, the smell, the way the notebook looks on the table, with the current location lighting, etc etc. There’s also the relatively slower, more physical act of actually writing by hand.

Brains normally form memories with all that data wrapped in. Typing on a screen it’s all kind of the same, compared to how different each physical writing experience feels. Those differences give your brain more “texture” to work with in forming a distinct memory and giving you hooks to recall it later.

If you’re interested in this stuff, there’s a very entertaining book about memory called “Moonwalking with Einstein,” which I highly recommend :)

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