When I take notes when typing, I can transcribe the content word-for-word without knowing what I am hearing and without thinking about it.

When I hand write, I am generally forced to either slow down and repeat what I am listening/watching (if an option), or actually think about what is being said, and choose the important parts to write down, or rephrase it in a more efficient-to-write way.

I am taking a course right now and I find repeatedly that I understand the concepts from taking down the notes (many aha moments), and then I remember. I rarely if ever actually look at the notes I take - they are objectively inferior as a product compared to the official course notes or the textbook.

Maybe typing would be efficient for learning if I was bad it - could be an interesting hypothesis to test.

This is how it was explained to me by a tutor: handwriting is better for learning because it's slower. The need for brevity forces you to mentally engage the material in ways that are more conducive to understanding and recall.

If you can replicate that mental engagement while typing, you'd probably get similar results.

This makes a lot of sense to me in light of what we know about how learning happens. I have never seen any research on brain activity though, and my tutor didn't cite any.

Handwriting notes engages your spatial memory, which is incredibly powerful (see: the ancient method of loci/memory palace techniques)

There were times in college where I blanked on important information during an exam, but was able to recall it by visualizing the physical sheets I had written my notes on. I aced several infamously difficult classes like OChem and OChem 2 using that technique.

I’ve never found it possible to do that with typed notes.

I think like many things, it's not universally true. At least for me I'm a really slow writer (and poor spelling), that if I were to hand write notes in a lecture, I'd focus on writing and miss half of what is said, and fall behind to the point that something I was copying from the board gets wiped off.

Maybe typing isn't ideal, but it's the better of the 2 options for me.

Riding a unicycle and coding are not complementary activities - you are multitasking. Writing is aligning different parts of your brain to the same task, perhaps it is just creating additional focus.

That's completely the wrong analogy. It's fairly well established through studies that language acquisition in preliterate kids is improved through handwriting (as opposed to typing or tracing letters).

Anecdotally from only place where I have experienced both. When playing TTRPGs like Dungeon & Dragons when people fill their character sheets by hand they tend to remember their abilities, features, and spells much better than people who use a fillable PDF and print it out. Even same person with fillable sheet will have to read through it constantly versus them writing it up by hand.

Probably chunk of that is copying vs interpreting, meaning just writing the rule as written vs rewording it to make it more concise and fit your brain, but also part of it definitely is it you remembering where you wrote something down instead of having to scan through bunch of stuff just to find the place you need.

The studies I'm familiar with have tested recall at various intervals, not brain activity.

> I know lots of people do say they learn better when handwriting, just like some people say they learn better while going for a walk. This does not translate into a universal theory of learning.

If lots of people said they code better while riding a unicycle, I'm not sure I'd just dismiss it off hand.

I share the skepticism, I feel you could probably pull up a bunch of random examples like walking being better for you than driving somewhere at a short distance but it's just not practical for long hauls and so they are definitely pointing to tangible benefits but maybe taking them out of context (enthusiasts for handwriting over typing pointing to real benefuts of writing but maybe ignoring how this can slow you down in impractical ways for greater speed and movement, etc.)

It probably depends on the task. I find that writing things out by hand is extremely helpful for memorizing.

False equivalence, the writing is always closely related to what you are thinking about.

The unicycle and FizzBuzz is (hopefully!!) not related.

A better scenario with FizzBuzz would maybe be writing down a sequence of numbers at the same time.

For myself, a significant difference is that writing a single word longhand "feels like" a single long unified action whereas typing a word "feels like" several short distinct actions. The motor-sensory action of writing matches that of speaking a bit more closely than typing, especially if you're a scribbler. OTOH I suspect typing is better cognitively for transcriptions, meeting minutes, etc., where deep understanding is unnecessary. I am sure you can cook up a study that proves or negates any one of these suspicions.

Sometimes I get benefit taking notes on a computer, e.g. I read Wittgenstein with notes in org-mode, took lots of notes about software/CS directly in the comments of the program implementing the ideas, etc etc.

This is pretty easy to prove via experiment, no?

1. Pick any topic,

2. purely reading,

3. try to write about it

I find myself "thinking" I understood something a lot more than I want to admit.

> universal theory of learning.

There is no such thing. Presumably there is a person who concentrates on algorithmic problems better while riding a unicycle. To the best of my knowledge the research shows people do not learn in the same way, although our hardware is more or less the same. The trick is to recognise what works for you, and only way to find it out is bu trying different things. Most people who succeed at all in higher education become experts on how they themselves learn best, simply because you won’t learn multivariable calculus, become fluent in Mandarin Chinese, or become an expert in late medieval poetry without trying every trick in the book to ram all that information into your brain.

Saying that, there is things that work for _most people_, active recall being probably the most universal one. Which simply means that if you do something a lot with a lot of repetition, you will eventually get quite good at it.And the probably is something in hand writing that forces you to actively engage with information processed better than typing for most/many people.

Personally, I have also noticed the better I get at touch typing the smaller this gap in enforcing learning by writing by had versus typing comes. That is purely anecdotal of course, but when we forced all the kids to use laptops to learn, did we teach them how to type properly first? Or to use computers in general? Or did we just gave them Chromebooks and said “good luck kiddo”?

>your brain is doing more does not mean it's doing the right thing!

the thing it's doing when writing with your hand is fine motor control, one of the most important and distinguishing abilities that humans have.

I tutor in a makerspace and one thing I've observed it's that it's now easier to teach old people how to solder than younger kids, and that in my experience has never been the case before. Due to growing up on impoverished digital interfaces I see lack of dexterity that I've never seen in young people before. Same reason I suspect you see a decline in people picking up tactile musical instruments like the guitar or violin.

I personally hate handwriting. My handwriting is ugly and slow, and I keep making annoying mistakes that I can’t fix. It’s generally a terrible experience.

If given the choice I’ll always type.

> For example, if I asked you to code FizzBuzz while riding a unicycle, I'm pretty sure you would show more brain activity than if you were just sitting at a desk.

This is an astoundingly bad comparison and I think you know how invalid it is. Doing two separate unrelated activities at the same time is not the same as engaging more parts of your brain by focusing on a single task.

You’re right in that what works for one might not work for others, but your argument is dishonest at best.

The problem is you immediately assume studies haven’t thought of that

Do you know that is how simplistic these studies actually are?

Indeed, the research is just laughable on its face, and of course it doesn't address the real issue - proving that all that extra brain involvement is positive, but hey, the author has already invested in the fountain pens, needs to prove it was the right choice!

I mean, be skeptical all you want, but at least TRY it.

I know I retain more if I handwrite notes. It's my lived experience, so that's what I do in meetings, generally. These notes get transcribed back into some orderly data store for later reference, but the initial notes are pen and paper.

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