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Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

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Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#101

Post by vasco »

headbee wrote: post #4

I can attest to this and took all of my notes on paper in college. However, once I started a real job I realized that this strategy doesn't scale to all situations. In college, I needed to be able to recall all of the information I had ingested: it was low-write, high-read. In the workplace, there's much more information, but I'm unlikely to need most of it: it's high-write, low-read. I need to be able to reference t…

I still do it and it has worked for me from being an individual contributor, to leading a team, to leading a part of the org that has a tree of ~50 people across multiple contexts.

The way I see it, if you know the best way to retain information, why would you stop using it. I note down almost everything during meetings, 1-1s, agile rituals, etc. Very rarely I move things to a computer, most things I just need to write down even if I never read them again, others I re-read, others are to-dos. No organization, just a flow of braindump, and lots of little drawings everywhere and arrows connecting things and so on. If you'd read it you'd not understand anything, both because the handwriting is atrocious and because there's practically no structure.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#102

Post by davisoneee »

phyphy wrote: post #78
newsclues wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to memorize a phone number rather than learn a complex subject, do you feel the same way? Are your feelings backed by data?

This is why open book examinations are a thing. Memorization is rather redundant IMO. Being able to use the concepts to solve the problems is an important skill.

You need to memorise enough of the topic to know what to look up in a book.

You need to memorise enough of the topic that you can draw relationships between disparate elements.

Having content in your memory means you have the ability to potentially pull it up quicker, or to pull it up in a situation (such as a team meeting) where you don't have access to the book.

If you rely only on what's previously written, foregoing memorisation, you are limited to the relationships that other people have written down.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#103

Post by ryyr »

headbee wrote: post #4

I can attest to this and took all of my notes on paper in college. However, once I started a real job I realized that this strategy doesn't scale to all situations. In college, I needed to be able to recall all of the information I had ingested: it was low-write, high-read. In the workplace, there's much more information, but I'm unlikely to need most of it: it's high-write, low-read. I need to be able to reference t…

very true, in my experience it's been hard to keep up by hand and much faster to type, but like handwritten notes i rarely reference meeting or project notes so i put little effort into organization. i settled on using onenote and different tabs for different teams

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#104

Post by hnbad »

Bilal_io wrote: post #87
emodendroket wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the slower, deliberate nature is the point here. The article does at least attempt to cite some research rather than just relying on anecdote.

As a person with ADHD, that slower, deliberate nature goes against everything my brain wants. Even when learning from video, certain speakers seem too slow, and my brain prefers speedy information intake otherwise it wanders off to another universe. I think my brain has a pretty wide bus, but no guarantees it has the next gen processor, and definitely no ECC memory, information gets corrupted and lost all the time. T…

On a related note: many autistic people suffer from forms of dyspraxia that make writing by hand physically unpleasant in addition to the ouput being hard to read.

Personally I like using pen and paper for dumb sketching because it helps me persist mental models in case I get distracted. But I find it really tedious for anything that requires any serious amount of information density or permanence. I've always avoided taking notes in classes because writing by hand felt tedious and slow, and typing created too many distractions if it was socially acceptable (or even allowed) at all.

I still flinch whenever someone asks me to take notes because even the process of transforming live conversations into serial form requires so much processing I can't fully pay attention to what's actually being said and risk losing track.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#106

Post by keiferski »

This reminds me of the Steve Jobs comment [1] about condors and bicycles:

“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

I agree that writing by hand (the condor) is better than typing (the human), but the missing part is Spaced Repetition (the bicycle.) Typing information into a SRS system is almost certainly more effective at retaining information than handwriting alone is.

I suppose you could handwrite cards and use something like the Leitner system [2], but this is extremely inefficient compared to using Anki/a software program. At the end of the day, if you seriously want to retain information, you should just use a SRS, full stop.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c__DV-Ul9AM

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#107

Post by renewiltord »

I know the research says this but I did this for a whole grad school semester class and remembered the least. When I try to remember a concept, I recall the place (sometimes down to the rough seating location in class) and the whole thing comes instantly flooding back to me.

Since my memory is nothing close to eidetic - I forget my keys, my car's parked location, all that stuff - I decided that note-taking would help supercharge me, but it debilitated me. I think it's because note-taking is its own skill and without being skilled at it, it took too much of my conscious thought pattern to:

- do the mechanical task of pen to paper

- edit to salient parts to select what goes down

So, I think a lot of the "writing is the best way" stuff comes from people who are akin to my "vim bindings are the best way". People who didn't grow up with vim bindings will find them unreasonable to learn - but I am much faster when I use them everywhere.

So I lean into my method: what I repeat I remember. I had a period where I needed to get a duplicate car title and insurance and everything. I can now write down my VIN by heart.

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#108

Post by moth-fuzz »

I'm going to challenge the question - if I've got something written down, why would I need to memorize it? Maybe in school where closed-notes tests are a thing, sure, but nowhere in the 'real-world' tests one's ability to memorize in the strict sense. I write things down for a reason and that reason is not just accessory to memorizing it. I put things on paper precisely so I don't have to put them in my brain. To keep them in both places would be redundant.

On that note, I have ADHD, and very little 'brain-RAM', and really lack the ability to memorize things or recall what I've memorized. The only consistent way I've found to 'memorize' things is to deep-learn them, to the point where I can infer all the answers from prior knowledge, and draw new conclusions from existing conclusions, pretty much all the way down. I can't just brute-force-memorize the conclusions themselves. Every step inbetween has to make sense. It's like memorizing the square series as individual numbers, 1, 4, 9, 16, etc. (something I cannot do) vs memorizing the formula x^2 and being able to calculate the resulting numbers when needed (something I can do).

Re: Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

#109

Post by linhns »

crazygringo wrote: post #35

I just want to add a gigantic caveat: NOT FOR EVERYBODY. I know a lot of people who insist writing by hand helps them. But I also know it's TERRIBLE for me personally. The article claims: > Writing by hand on paper creates a tactile, personalized experience... The complex experience of hand writing on paper contains a multitude of variable elements: the creativity of an individual’s written representation of language…

Same for me. People kept telling me to take notes when listening and when I tried it, I immediate lost track after jotting down just a few words.
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