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Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

productivegrowth.substack.com

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Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#51

Post by lifeisstillgood »

samuell wrote: post #16

One aspect the article doesn't mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing. As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world. This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest…

One outcome of that is vicious hier(5) wars - everyone has a particular hierarchy of folders that "makes obvious sense" to them, mostly I suspect because of spatiality.

It would be like someone moving the rooms in your house.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#52

Post by jbverschoor »

Our biology teacher told us to not bring the text book. He wrote and drew everything on the blackboard, and we had to copy it by writing it down.

Never had to learn anythings, and I still remember 90% of it, even visually.

Remember that the great ones wrote a lot.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#53

Post by samuell »

slx26 wrote: post #48
anyfoo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spatiality, that's it. It really seems to make a tremendous difference for me to know where something is written down, and sometimes even remembering doing it. I always felt that doing it on a computer was indeed too abstract, losing that spatiality. I also agree with the audiobook thing. For example, I recently thought back to a passage in an audiobook I enjoyed... and my mind instantly visualized how I was standing…

Though I think it's an even more general mechanism of association . And places might also be easy to remember because they also contain many elements we can associate. You can call it the connectedness of a memory. You can also try to repeatedly explain to others something you want to remember or whatever.

Could be, but to me it seems our brains are optimized a lot for operating in the spatio(temporal) world, and so spatial connections in particular seem to fit the wiring of our brains particularly well.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#54

Post by tombert »

Bit of a life-hack I picked up awhile ago is to "write the notes by hand, then type them out later".

This has a few advantages. First, you basically get all the benefits listed in this article. Second, you get the advantage of repetition, and possibly correcting errors in your handwritten notes. Last, you have pretty notes to read off of later if you need to study for something, which is useful.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#55

Post by beforeolives »

samuell wrote: post #16

One aspect the article doesn't mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing. As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world. This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest…

> I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest that I was listening to a particular passage in the book - and vice versa

I've experienced the same thing. I sometimes relisten to podcasts and specific lines in the podcast bring back the place where I was physically when I heard the line for the first time. Like "Oh I was walking down this part of that street around 7pm 2 years ago when I heard this for the first time". I don't think that I have experienced it in reverse though.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#56

Post by heronalps »

anyfoo wrote: post #23
samuell wrote: post #16

One aspect the article doesn't mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing. As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world. This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest…

Spatiality, that's it. It really seems to make a tremendous difference for me to know where something is written down, and sometimes even remembering doing it. I always felt that doing it on a computer was indeed too abstract, losing that spatiality. I also agree with the audiobook thing. For example, I recently thought back to a passage in an audiobook I enjoyed... and my mind instantly visualized how I was standing…

The seemingly “disconnection” between the concept and spatial memory happens to me a lot either in day time or dream. Most of the scenes occurred in my childhood, and I feel my emotions, i.e. happiness, somber, anger, are associated with them, which pop up when those feelings struck.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#57

Post by bennysonething »

samuell wrote: post #16

One aspect the article doesn't mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing. As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world. This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest…

I've been noticing this over last few years too. Replying a podcast and I recall where I was at certain bits.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#58

Post by cameronh90 »

samuell wrote: post #16

One aspect the article doesn't mention is spatiality, and how that aids memorizing. As you might know one very common technique used by memorizing masters is to place things you want to remember in some imagined 3D world. This effect is also something I've experienced strongly myself when listening to audiobooks while running. I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest…

During the pandemic, I have been listening to audiobooks while I’m programming. I don’t really listen to the content, it just makes me feel less lonely.

But what I’ve found is that I end up associating code I’m writing to the audiobook I’m listening to at the time. Later on, when I work on that bit of code again, I replay the audiobook I was listening to when I wrote it, and it helps me remember how that code works.

Re: Why I’m a sucker for pen and paper

#59

Post by SiVal »

WalterBright wrote: post #15
briandoll wrote: post #11

This is one of the reasons I've started to use the reMarkable tablet for taking notes. Sometimes I don't even look at them again, it's just a more efficient way to get the info into my head. I wrote more about my current workflow/stack here if anyone is interested (w/ some reMarkable hacks): https://briandoll.medium.com/personal-setup-for-getting-shit...

I take notes in a $.79 spiral paper notebook. When it fills up, I just scan it and get another one.

Can you recommend a quick, easy method for scanning all the pages?

I like paper notebooks, too. Someday, I'd like to have an app that would let me turn any ordinary stack of scratch paper or notebook into a searchable PDF in under 5 minutes. I would finish a notebook and just put my phone on a gooseneck stand and turn the pages one at a time (not riffle) at one page per second or two, and it would know when to take the photos, which it would flatten, orient, and bind into a PDF of the notebook. It would maintain my handwritten pages but add an OCR'ed backstore of the text that could be used to create something like a table of contents, an index, and a fulltext search.

I imagine some portion of that is already available, and the rest will be arriving anytime now.

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