Why we still need pens to write in the electronic age

With laptops, most people are able to write down what they hear more quickly, whether it's a meeting, a class, or a lecture. Some people have even become adept at using voice recognition to take notes and write them down word for word.

Some people are accustomed to taking notes when reading books, and if it is an electronic version of the book, it may be more convenient, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V operation can be a large part of the description down. Many people take such a habit as a sign of information technology and paperlessness, as a kind of progress.

However, it was confirmed in a recent study that memorization is still best when notes are taken with the most traditional paper and pen in learning.

People often encounter the confusion that they insist on reading many categories of knowledge every day, but they can't remember them when they need to use them.

Scientists at the University of Tokyo published their study in March 2021 in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

They recruited 48 volunteers aged 18-29 from universities and research institutes in Japan. And they did a prior memory test on them so as not to interfere with the test scores by grouping together extremely good or very poor performers when there weren't enough of them. These 48 people according to memory ability, gender, age, evenly divided into two groups of people, ready to be tested.

The test was to give them a fictional character dialog, the conversation of the three characters talked about the next 2-3 months in their own learning arrangements and living arrangements, such as the number of months and the number of which subjects to complete the homework, the number of books to go to the library to borrow books, the number of what exams, etc., a **** 14 things. These contents are what they want to idea to write down, but the 3 groups of people to assist memory tools are different, the first group with paper and pen, the second group with the calendar app in the tablet and stylus, the results found that the traditional paper and pen still have a good effect on memory.

By summarizing, they put forward the following suggestions for memory improvement in the information age:

1. Many people study platforms, and after studying for a period of time, feel that they are quite productive, and also believe that they have learned something. But every time in the discussion with friends or in the writing of the manuscript, and found that they do not seem to understand thoroughly, can not say a reason, some of the truth into a seemingly unintelligible. This is due to the learning style is not right, leading to learning after the knowledge can not be internalized.

At this point, you can revise your learning to three levels:

The first level is to find out the key points in the learning content or famous quotes and sentences, and record them with pen and paper or Ctr-C and Ctr-V operations.

The second level is to be able to express your own insights and thoughts on what you have learned in your own words. That is, to verify the knowledge in the book with actual experience, such as in the past experience of what things should be held up, but did not hold up, etc.

The second level is to be able to express your own learning in your own words.

The third level is to often review their notes, so that in addition to deepening the impression, you can find the coherence and relevance of the notes. Many times I find myself with new insights and inspirations, and I write them down in my notes.

In these three levels, drawing highlights or quoting quotes and sentences, experiments have shown that people gain the most, in addition to concise and easy to remember text is memorable, highlights, quotes, and quotes can also be used as the title of everyone's notes.

In addition to penciling in highlights, quotes, and quotes in your notes, you can also pencil in highlights in your scripts and speeches.

This not only helps with memorization, but also with creativity, which is why some of the most prominent contemporary writers, such as JK Rowling, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King, still prefer to write by hand rather than by keyboard.

The reason why handwriting improves memory is because writing by hand uses more of the brain's processing system than typing, and will coordinate our brain and hands in a deeper way you are forced to organize information more concisely, and this means that we have to think harder about what we are writing by hand, which would not be achieved with a keyboard or screen.

When we type, it's almost as if the information is just being transferred to the screen using your body as a conduit: when you write, the information is actually being stored and processed for later use and recall.

Handwriting also forces us to think and filter, and when writing things down by hand, we're taking advantage of the benefits of receiving limitations. By limiting ourselves to physical space (we can only write so much on a page) and physical capacity (we can only write so fast), we are then forced to decide for ourselves what is most important.

But if we're taking notes or writing out to-do lists on a screen, that means we'll have endless space to do those things, and thus our brains won't get a workout.

Meanwhile handwriting is more free, and with freedom comes creativity. For example, if we write on paper (or a whiteboard), we are able to organize our content in a "line-by-line format" that goes beyond what computers and mobile apps offer.

This allows us to draw boxes around important items, arrows between connected ideas, set lists into columns, and even draw pictures when needed.

While some apps allow this kind of free editing, they're always clunky and not as convenient as handwriting. After all, sometimes the greater convenience of scribbling on the fly can lead to sudden creativity and inspiration.

Because handwriting has such a unique kinetic energy, when words flow out of our brain, through our arms and hands, and onto a page, it feels like a very physical process, the product of brain and hand and even whole-body coordination, which is not the same as when the words flow through the keyboard and into the digital world.