Comment by odyssey7
4 days ago
As a CS student, the way I learned things I needed to memorize was by writing it down / copying / summarizing on paper and studying from that.
It’s a little ridiculous to reframe that a significant part of my education was an exercise in copying information over by hand, but it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me.
Also: my reading speed was ungodly slow. I think I considered it typical to spend 3 hours on 10 textbook pages. Sometimes it took longer. But the information stuck, and I knew it well.
> it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me
It's not just you. My kids didn't want to hear it, but they're coming round to the benefits of writing notes during their learning.
Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529...
Advantage of Handwriting Over Typing on Learning Words https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8222525/
The studies you linked are garbage not related to the only part that matters - learning. What they measured is that if you ride a bike while listening your legs will have higher muscle activity, and so will your brain that managed those legs.
There is only downside in distracting yourself to have to copy everything verbatim instead of, you know, actually focusing on the material being presented
good handwritten notes do not copy everything verbatim. You tend to summarize as you write it. That is part of the learning process.
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Cite?
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Currently, at work, I can't make progress on anything to do with geometry or graph structure or math without LIBERAL use of scratch paper.
Keeping notes on what I'm doing in org-mode is somewhat helpful, but drawing rough sketches of what I see in the debugger is essential.
I did the same, double copy: one during the lesson, ugly and full of mistakes, and one at home, well done and corrected. Took time, but I really made sure I understood the topic.
I'm your opposite as the extremely sparse note-taker. I can use a notepad for writing down basic checklists but absolutely cannot take notes when learning. My main way of learning, and doing cognitive work in general, is of listening/absorbing, then ruminating and synthesizing my own new ideas later.
I wonder if my contrary experience is linked to my being mostly aphantasic and also lacking an internal monologue. Verbal input and output are activities I have to engage which takes me out of my default mode of thinking. And they are somewhat mutually-exclusive. Roughly speaking, it is like I have different mental postures for these. I think easily in a "resting" state. Figuratively, I have to "sit up" (for reading) or "stand up" (for listening). To write or speak, I go further into a variant "fighting" posture, e.g. getting myself centered and my reflexes cranked up more.
Also, I feel like anything I really learn is merged into my unified "world model" almost immediately or with a very short latency. But, I have very poor rote memory. I don't memorize what I hear or read. I extend my understanding and then can speak from that understanding later, in my own words. I do best when I can learn something abstractly and synthesize a bunch of related ideas from that understanding. I can infer my own abstractions, but I need to do so rapidly before I lose the examples being communicated.
I struggle when there is an expectation to memorize disconnected examples and defer the abstraction. If I don't generally understand new content in real-time as I listen or read, it is just noise. I cannot recall content I didn't understand in order to figure it out later. I only retain the meta-memory that I was exposed to and rejected some arbitrary noise...
That's exactly the kind of study routine that's proven to lead to mastery of the material (understanding, not just memorizing). Starting from there and with a few tweaks you've got yourself a Zettelkasten.
The best tests in school were ones that allowed me to bring in a notecard of notes. I would have to ration out the information I was going to write; how and where and how big were all important.
By the time I filled both sides with an entire college class of info I might not remember, I often didn't need the card... so I began doing this for other tests where I couldn't bring the card in.
In college I always took notes in class then I would rewrite them and at the same time organize them. In my study groups people would always copy my re-written notes. There was certainly something there aiding in learning, more than just sending a document of notes and just reading it.
Sometimes I'd just take one set of notes and then not look at them after.
So then I got the brilliant idea to not take notes, since I wasn't looking at them!
It turned out that the act of taking the notes was fixing the material in my head such that I didn't need the notes to refer back to.
Aside from learning, I also find that pen-and-paper is much more effective for journaling, when I want to work through a problem or brainstorm something. Once I've worked it out, I'll often type it in so I've got it saved in a searchable, archivable form. But putting it on paper first seems to help me think about it. It's like I see the words in a deeper way than when I'm putting them on the screen.
The thing is, writing on paper is much slower and hurtful than typing, but then again maybe that's the point when the goal is to keep it brain-stored and understood.
Same here. Part of me wonders if primary school trains your brain to learn via writing things down on paper.
Similar experience, I took written notes in uni and it worked pretty well. I think my laziness helped - I wanted to write the minimal set of notes possible, so it encouraged me to understand the content, figure out what was significant, then write that down.
I think copying by hand might seem inefficient, but it forces you to slow down and actually process the material instead of just skimming
I find it odd that some people find that way of teaching/learning odd.