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Comment by lukeqsee | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat tangentially, I've started using $1.35 Moleskine-style notebooks to take notes in classes I care about. I've discovered that as bad as my handwriting is, my attention, focus, and net-gain from classes is significantly higher when all I have is ~8x5 blank paper to distract me.

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I agree completely. When I was a student I also eschewed using my computer during class for a notebook. I might never look at the notes I took again, but something about going from input to output makes the ideas stick better.

Later when I became a teacher for a short while, I tried to build that kind of concept into the curriculum to pretty good result.

I wrote some about it here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8253351

That has been studied and seems to have been verified:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2552125/Revis...

> The students taking notes the old fashioned way took fewer of them with less verbatim recording, but remembered more facts and understood more concepts from the lecture, according to the study, which is published in the journal Psychological Science.

I've also noticed that I retain information much better when I'm actually writing it down on paper, than when I take quick notes on a laptop. I don't know the cognitive basis for this, but I suspect that it has something to do with it being a much 'slower' medium to register information in. Somehow your brain is forced to focus on the information that's at hand, instead of immediately trying to skip ahead to what's coming up next.

I don't use moleskines though, they're way overpriced for the poor quality paper they offer (i.e. it's not fountain pen friendly, which is what I usually use). Spiral notebooks are much cheaper, practical and usually provide better quality paper.

I find that I put more value into and mull over more the ideas that I will write in my Moleskine than on a random piece of paper.

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