They found activity in desirable parts of the brain. Being chased by a lion would trigger panic responses and parts of your brain would be shut down. So no, any increase in complication will not work. I certainly doubt texting while driving will work to improve connectivity in the parts of your brain required for safe driving.
Somewhat related, I recall a study on how we find it easier to perform complex mechanical tasks while moving our tongues or sticking them out. Which seems to be how our brains use of language gets tied to physical activity when we need to really concentrate and engage higher thought. I can grasp how writing could well improve memory formation, forcing us to codify thought into language, engaging those parts of the brain that use language for reasoning. But interesting if typing does it worse.
Well the more you do it, the better you'd get at it. The problem isn't that doing it makes you unsafe, it's that most people are not actually capable of doing it safely and we don't necessarily want people to risk other peoples' lives learning how to do it better.
Part of this relied on the professors distributing lecture slides afterwards, which they always did. Helped jog my memory later and remind me of what to study for the final.
The strategy of only writing down the important details that everyone advocates does not work very well in math. I can't know what the important details are until days or even weeks after the lecture, when I've had enough time to digest and work through the material while completing the assigned problems. Of course, this is much more true at the beginning of a course (when I've had no prior exposure to the topic) than it is at the end.
I went back and forth between pencil and paper and LaTeX for assignment work. For some courses the proofs were fairly short so it was easy enough to work on paper. For others, the proofs could get several pages long and small mistakes could lead to lots of erasing. It doesn't take very much erasing/rewriting to annoy me enough to switch over to LaTeX. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than erasing and/or rewriting half a page of material because of some mistake.
The poor student followed him all the way out of the room and down the hall, begging not to be reported to the associate dean's office!
Uniballs on unicycles?
Lance Armstrong just came out of retirement