I feel it shares aspects with Rubber Duck Debugging: The effort of taking something you "know" and forcing it back out through other brain-circuits (i.e. language and/or simulating a social interaction) helps to fill gaps that your brain would otherwise skip over. The act of hearing/seeing your output also causes other parts of your brain to analyze it as if it were someone else's thought.
I suspect our consciousness isn't nearly as unified as we like to believe.
Tests in middle school, I could recall writing things down, even the part of the page I wrote them in.
By college I would write TODO's down and lose them, and not be able to recall what I wrote down. Misplacing the note was more likely than forgetting the task, so I stopped writing them down.
I should try to measure this again because right now I couldn't tell you which works better.
One of the most uncomfortable things about getting older is that in your teens and 20's you spent all this time figuring out who you are, what you like, what you're good at and what you struggle with. Age, changes in health, coping mechanisms, changes in perspective all fuck around with this and you can find yourself in situations you should avoid or avoiding situations you could embrace.
It's like a weird mid-life crisis.
Hm, basically it's making real final decision, instead of playing with a bunch of potenial possible decisions which are all somewhat equal, but also kinda fuzzy,
I've found Freemind to work well enough for me. Search not needed as I browse the graph easily enough.
I am now dabbling with reviewing them, although not sure what that will lead to, as they are so unstructured. There are generally a few gems in there to be remembered, but mostly spur of the moment gibberish!