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Comment by andy_xor_andrew | Hacker News Reader

This smells true to me, though I couldn't exactly explain why.

(baseless speculation below)

One thing I've noticed is how drastically my handwriting (and maybe hand dexterity in general) varies wildly from hour to hour, mostly depending on how tired I am or how much caffeine I've had.

If I'm feeling tired and sluggish, my handwriting is a disaster. It doesn't look good. It doesn't feel good. But after some caffeine, or otherwise becoming more alert, suddenly it looks better, and it feels much better as I do it.

Is this just me? I guess it's not surprising that caffeine would have an impact like this. But the part that's surprising to me is how pronounced and reliable it is.

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When taking notes by hand from a lecture, all I can really focus on is the typography. As in, will I be able to recognize this later?

Maybe the repeated parsing and checking for legibility is the foil that improves memory retention!

For me it's just the act of writing. When preparing for an exam I would write tons of notes on paper, but I hardly read them. The act of writing on paper was enough.

I tried skipping the paper but typing notes didn't have close to the same effect, by an order of magnitude or two.

I still do this in meetings with customers and similar, keeping a small notebook. I'll write down key points, but I very seldom have to reference it later.

Perhaps just slowing down to handwriting speed is enough to trigger retention?

Would be interesting to know if people who take shorthand notes (they still do that at trials?) remember what they've written.

For me I feel like it's the additional processing required, not the speed.

I'm not a super-fast typist, but do write quite quick by hand, so speed difference isn't great.

I am wondering for a long time whether this differs from person to person based on their preferred mode of thinking.

As a seemingly overly visual thinker the aspect of making several small decisions about how to layout what I'm writing down by hand also seems to play a huge role in that. I have to make positioning and thereby spacing and sizing decisions, choose the color, as well as making decisions on in what style (caps, cursive, script) I write each letter. I can easily use graphical elements like lines, arrows, boxes, etc.

Anything created digitally by primarily typing will always have a more dynamic and flowing nature, while following the linearity of the typed sequence of characters. It takes away a lot of the decisions that I have to make when laying out a handwritten note.

Anecdotally, I seem to remember mindmaps created with digital tools that rearrange elements automatically based on available space much less than hand-drawn ones. Yet, those come with their own downsides.

I suspect it's an embodied cognition thing. There is a very similar experience in musicians, where it's much much more difficult to reason about theory away from your instrument.

Even simple trivia type questions like "what's the V chord in F" are on basically instant recall for an experienced musician but without your instrument you have to stop and think (possibly even picturing your hands on your instrument) to answer.

To a limited extent I could see getting this result too, but from what I remember during school it wasn't the writing, it was the paper: I used spacial memory to remember which page and what location on the page something was at, instead of remembering the thing directly. And I could do it with things in textbooks I'd only read, not written.

For me my handwriting varies wildly based on what writing instrument I'm using. Fountain pen? Pretty good writing. Ball point pen? Pretty sloppy writing. Pencil? Somewhere in between, depending on what sort of pencil.

I’m pretty sure this is something that is widely suspected but hard to measure.

I wish we could quantify this.

Handwriting things results in much better retention for me, but the notes are useless. Typed notes are a fantastic, easily edited artifact, but I feel the practice actually lowers my overall comprehension.

I want to concretely know if this is true, or just some weird bias.

I also want a tool that works well with both human memory and editability/searchability.

I’m sure there’s a smartphone app or something like that out there, to snapshot your notes and digitize them.

rocketbooks are built around this exactly, theyre supposed to be reusable notebooks that you write in with one of those erasable pens and at the end of the day you get your phone and scan each page and erase them all ready for the next day

Yes I’d love to hear if anybody found any good note taking apps that do good ocr and that lets the notes be organized and tagged afterwards zettelkasten style.

As someone whose handwriting is a disaster all day every day, the amount of coffee I would need to reach competency would kill me.

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