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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

As someone who always "thinks with a pencil", this isn't terribly surprising. Even if coding, if something was especially tricky, I'd sketch/doodle/write on paper to get ideas straight. Always worked out quicker and better for me, though I know some saw it as quaint.

Same for note-taking and todo lists+organising (I have smart phone always on me, but small notebook that's my todo list). I tried and failed with dozens of electronic organisers, apps and so forth.

I've only ever seen anecdotal ideas as to why this is so. I'd be fascinated to see some study into why. Is it a more manual process, does it involve more brain regions, does it interface with memory differently?

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My anecdotal contribution:

I always took notes on paper, even though I never even read them. I have trouble sitting still and get bored and distracted very easily, so having something to do with my hands helped me pay attention in university. Doing the same on a computer would mean I would tab into something else and get distracted.

Note taking is similar, if I write something on a piece of paper on my desk, when I get fidgety and move around I'm going to see it. If I wrote it on my computer, it'd be buried and forgotten behind my 20 browser tabs, mail client, editor windows, terminals, etc, and that's if I remembered to open it the next day.

Having a whiteboard on my desk made me way more productive at work. So I would think the reasoning is less deep, it's more that there's less distraction on paper than on a computer.

I am near certain that if I were 40 years younger I'd have been ADHD diagnosed. So I can easily believe it's a distraction / concentration mechanism, for me at least.

I suspect the same, am also a rabid note-taker, and rarely revisit my notes. Writing is a means by which I build houses of cards in my head.

Last year I tried some Ritalin I'd been given so I could understand the effect. What I found was that it gives me a sensation that is similar to when I'm in flow. But - for me - it feels plastic. I found it to be inferior to normal flow and I felt less in control than with normal flow. That might improve with exposure.

I can see where Ritalin would be useful if you needed to get to flow on-demand. A back-door I use for this - write a throw-away dear-diary whinge about why I can't get started. The obstacle is a feeling - so I name that. Then I look for a source of it. This is generally a technical problem that's energy-intensive to load into my mind. So I write about the complications that make me see it as energy-intensive. By then it's started. [I've mentioned this before on hn and apologise if I get boring]

Thanks for the trick. (Writing about the issue)

Also my approach. I always (try to) bring some notepad and pencils. Most often it's not even notes for myself, but just writing down a few points I find remarkable, or on which I'm going to ask questions or make a remark at a later time into the presentation or lecture when they might be relevant.

Also when writing with pen/pencil you are essentially always drawing. I think this allows the writer to capture a lot nuances on the page which might not be ideal for review but at the time of capture they help reinforce ideas as the brain is processing them.

Hmm, I knew this a lot better a couple of years ago so what I'm about to say may not be entirely accurate but it is a line of thought that is out there and I guess you'll get the idea.

What I have noticed is that when you take notes you're slower with writing something down compared to when you type it up. This basically means that there's a bigger chance that whatever you write down gets remembered since you're repeating it to yourself more often.

I don't think it explains the whole story though. I'd be interested to see if fairly slow typers (as in: typing as fast as writers do with their pens) are better notetakers as well compared to fast typers.

I think this has not only todo with focus, but also with more brainregions involved into manual drawing of shapes, instead of just hitting a relatively large space.

I think more "picture thinking" is involed while typing seems to be more like speech (linear).

Maybe this just stems from the fact that you learn to write manually and learn to type much later in life.

1. Writing takes longer than typing.

2. The longer you think about something the more permanent of a memory it becomes.

And the longer it takes more you miss during lecture.

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