The easier note-taking has become, the less it feels like we actually remember things. Personally, I find that fascinating.
Today we have Notion, AI summaries, tablets, automatic transcriptions, apps for everything, recordings, clouds, folders, subfolders and folders inside folders. We’ve never had so many tools to store information and yet everyone still constantly says, “wait, I already forgot.”
There’s a study from Princeton and UCLA that discovered something strange. People who took notes on a computer wrote far more than people writing by hand. Around 65% more words.
But when it came to the questions that actually mattered, the conceptual ones, the ones that show whether you truly understood something, they performed significantly worse.
And the weirdest part is that even a week later, with access to their own notes, they still performed worse.
In other words, they wrote more, but understood less.
Because apparently the brain doesn’t enjoy copying as much as we think. It prefers processing.
The interesting part is that people typing on a computer tended to transcribe almost word for word, while people writing by hand were forced to summarize, interpret and think, “ok, but what actually matters here?”. And apparently that’s exactly where memory happens.
In the small friction.
I think the problem is that today we confuse storing information with understanding information, and those are definitely not the same thing. Sometimes it feels like modern productivity is basically premium storage. We save PDFs we’ll never open again, screenshots, links, notes, ideas, templates and bookmarks, but we stop less and less to actually connect ideas, make weird diagrams, draw, summarize or simply think.
There’s a sentence I read on X about this topic that got stuck in my head:
“The productivity ritual is an amnesia ritual.”
And as painful as it is to admit, I think I understand exactly what it means.
Because sometimes we leave a meeting with four pages of notes and zero processed ideas. We didn’t understand the subject better. We just recorded the moment.
At Infinitebook we’ve always loved the idea of whiteboards, and I think this is exactly why. A whiteboard doesn’t feel definitive. You’re not afraid of making mistakes, writing something terrible, erasing it, drawing a meaningless arrow or going back five times. There’s a strange sense of freedom in whiteboards because they don’t feel like an official document. They feel like thought in its raw state.
Maybe that’s what many digital tools still lack. Space for imperfect thinking.
There’s also another interesting concept called the “generation effect”. Basically, the brain memorizes better what it helps build than what it simply receives. In other words, memory isn’t born from the act of recording information. It comes from the effort of reformulating, rebuilding, simplifying and trying to understand.
And maybe that’s why writing by hand still feels different. Slower, messier, more human, but also more real.
Maybe the purpose of a notebook was never to store ideas. Maybe it was always to help us find them.
If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, here are some of the studies and articles that inspired this reflection:
“The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard” — Mueller & Oppenheimer (Princeton / UCLA, 2014):
https://brucehayes.org/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf
“You’ll Absorb More If You Take Notes by Hand” — Harvard Business Review:
https://hbr.org/2014/05/youll-absorb-more-if-you-take-notes-in-longhand
“Consequences of cognitive offloading: Boosting performance but diminishing memory”:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8358584/
“The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon”:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232485723_The_generation_effect_Delineation_of_a_phenomenon
