Why Every Developer Needs a Paper Notebook (According to Science)

So, I'm currently sharing my learning Rust journey online and people are wondering why I'm writing notes on paper. And I know that this feels kind of weird because as a software developer, I feel like we're so used to everything being digital and we've been told, I feel like that digitizing your notes and everything is like more of a a modern way of doing things, but I would argue that I find it a lot less effective at memory retention and understanding underlying concepts that

I'm being taught when it's in a digital format versus analog. So, in this video, I'm going to dive into how I take notes because I do think that how I take notes and translate that to pen on paper is a big part of that retention for me and that understanding and why I find it such an engaging way to learn. And then I'll also jump into some of the more recent research around an analog note-taking versus digital and how that affects memory. So, without further ado, let's jump right into it. I'll start this off by saying that it's really

important for me when I'm learning a new concept to understand the why. Why is this relevant? How does it apply in the real world? And I generally try to compound what I'm learning and associate a new concept with some existing knowledge. And often I'll make that in the form of a hypotheses based on what I know and what I'm now being told. I'm going to guess that this feature is in place for X, Y, or Z. And that is

actually something do while I'm reading it and I'll write that down in my notes so that I can either prove or deny that hypothesis later as I learn more and have more contextual awareness of the thing that I'm learning. So, that is one thing that I'll do when I'm writing notes. I will write down any questions and I'll formulate hypotheses as I'm going through the content and I find that it makes it a lot more interesting to me, a lot more engaging, and it makes me feel like I'm part of something. If that makes sense. But another thing

that I'll do in my notes is that I'm not writing anything verbatim. When I'm writing my analog notes, I am reading multiple paragraphs and then I'm translating that into the most concise recap that I can give in my own words and writing that down in my notebook. I'll also often back it up with illustrations or while I'm reading, I'm often trying to visualize what it is that it's telling me. And so, I'll draw out some kind of illustration to

demonstrate that. For example, if we're talking about memory management, I'll probably have something drawn out with the stack and the heap and different pointers and have a little asterisk and state that one of them is last in, first out, whatever. Just emphasizing the really key parts that make that thing stand out. Nothing more because I'm not planning on having to index these notes. These are notes that I might look at in the future when I look back on it and I'll remember exactly what I was

learning at that time, where my head was at because this is more of like a mental snapshot than it is a comprehensive overview of what I've learned. At least that's how I treat my analog notes because I mean, let's be so real. All of this information being digital, like if I have a book that I'm trying to reference that I have in a digital format, I can just index it. I can just look it up. I can find that very detailed definition, but I'm I can't so

easily find the illustrations, the visualizations, the specific keywords that stood out to me when I was learning that topic that made it click. And that is what my paper notes are for. Now, another thing that I'll often do in my notes is that I'll have almost like a mind map kind of thing in order to be able to show relationships between different topics and how different things fit together. Now, in software, this is like you see this everywhere. So, to me that is one

way where I can just look at something at a glance and understand what's going on and be able to reference that and it helps a ton. I'll give another example of a kind of note-taking that I'll do and that is like when I'm debugging, for example. One thing that I find super helpful is if I have a pen and paper next to me, is I'll pretty much write out the call stack of the suspected bug >> [music] >> and I'll annotate like what is the caller, where I think it's going wrong, and then like what other questions or

apprehensions that I have as I'm stepping through the code in the debugger so I can take those notes without losing too much context of what I'm doing in the debugger. And now, we're going to look at some of the peer-reviewed research that I pulled up for this. Most of this I got just through Science Daily, which is an incredible platform for being able to stay up to date on some of the latest peer-reviewed research that's going on in different industries. It's free and it's written in a very easy [music] to

digest format instead of having to like read the whole paper itself, which also often have paywalls or restricted access in some way or another. So, I do really like Science Daily, but let me pull that up. This article from 2014 talks about how writing notes by hand leads to better long-term comprehension of whatever it is that you're learning. So, in short, what this article states is that despite all students performing

very similarly for recalling facts, whether they hand wrote it or wrote it in their laptop, the laptop note-takers fell short on the conceptual questions. So, when it came to understanding more of those kind of relationships of how things tied together, they struggled more in re-calling that form of information. Now, even a week later, the note-takers out-performed the laptop note-takers on recall when they were given a chance to review their

notes before taking the recall test. Laptop notes also contained a lot more words and verbatim overlap with the lecture, which means that a lot of students were basically acting as transcribers rather than active learners who are processing the information, figuring out what's actually important enough to take as a note. Instead, they're just writing everything down and then it's a it's essentially the equivalent of your textbook readings at the end of the day. Because with handwriting, you're much more limited

for time, you need to be a lot more selective with what you choose to write down. This means that it requires a lot more active engagement and selection of the content when it's presented. So, here you can see that they do talk about how the notes from laptop users contain more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture compared to the ones that were written by hand. And students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by mindless

transcription. Your job as a student and or as a learner is not to just copy over information from one medium to another, it's to read and understand that information and be able to act on that and have some form of output based on that information that you've just received. So, that is study number one. Now, study number two is really interesting. This one is more recent. The previous one was from 2014. This one is from 2021. This is a study from the

University of Tokyo and this one I'm actually going to fully dive into because I think it offers a very new and fresh perspective. So, let's talk about it. A study of Japanese university students and recent graduates has revealed that writing on physical paper can lead to more brain activity when remembering the information an hour later. Researchers say that the unique, complex, spatial, and tactile information associated with writing by hand on physical paper is likely what leads to improved memory.

Actually, paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic according to a Professor Kuniyoshi Sakai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo. So, contrary to the popular belief that digital tools increase efficiency, volunteers who used paper completed a note-taking task about 25% faster than those who used digital tablets or smartphones. Although the

volunteers wrote by hand both with pen and paper or a stylus and digital tablet, the researchers say that paper notebooks contained a lot more complex spatial information than digital paper. And physical paper allows for more tangible permanence, irregular strokes, and uneven shape [music] like folded corners. And by contrast, the digital paper being uniform with no fixed position when scrolling and it disappears when you close the app. The take-home message is to use paper notebooks for information that we need to learn or memorize. The study

consisted of a total of 48 volunteers that read a fictional conversation between characters discussing their plans for two months in the near future. It included 14 different class times, assignment due dates, and personal appointments. Researchers performed pretest analysis to ensure that the volunteers, all aged 18 to 29 years old and recruited from university campuses or NTT offices, were equally sorted into three groups based on memory skills, personal preference for digital or analog methods, gender, age, and other

aspects. Volunteers then recorded the fictional schedule using a paper daybook and pen, a calendar app on a digital tablet and a stylus, or a calendar app on a large smartphone and a touchscreen keyboard. There's no time limit and they were asked to record the fictional events in the same way they would for real-life schedules without spending extra time to memorize the schedule. After an hour including the breaks, volunteers answered a range of simple and complex multiple choice questions to test their memory of the schedule. When they completed the test, volunteers were

inside of an MRI scanner, which measures blood flow around the brain. This is a technique called functional MRI, and increased blood flow observed in a specific region of the brain is a sign [music] of increased neuronal activity in that area. Now, participants who used the paper daybook filled the calendar within about 11 minutes, tablet users took 14, smartphone was 16. The volunteers who used analog methods in their personal life were just as slow at using the devices as volunteers who regularly used digital tools. So,

researchers are confident that the difference in speed was related to memorization or associated encoding in the brain, and not just differences in habitual use of the tools. So, in short, there was no [music] performance increase with the digital tools. The volunteers who used the analog method scored better than other volunteers only on simple brain test questions. However, [music] researchers say that the brain activation data revealed significant differences. So, volunteers who used paper had more brain activity in areas associated with language, imaginary

visualization, and in the hippocampus, an area known to be important for memory and navigation. Researchers say that the activation of the hippocampus indicates that analog methods contain richer spatial details that can be recalled and navigated in the mind's eye. Digital tools have uniform scrolling up and down and standardized arrangement of text and picture size like on a webpage, but if you remember a physical textbook printed on paper, you can close your eyes and visualize the photo 1/3 of the way down on the left side of the page, as well as the notes that you added in the bottom margin. Researchers say that

personalizing digital documents by highlighting, underlining, circling, drawing arrows, handwriting color-coded notes in the margins, and adding virtual sticky notes and other types of unique markups can mimic the analog style of spatial enrichment that may enhance memory. And although they have no data from younger volunteers, researchers suspect that the difference in brain activation between analog and digital methods is likely to be stronger in younger people. They say that high school students' brains are still developing and are much more sensitive than adult brains.

Although the current research focused on learning and memorization, the researchers encouraged using paper for creative pursuits as well. It's reasonable that one's creativity will likely become more fruitful if prior knowledge is stored with stronger learning and more precisely retrieved from memory. [music] Yet another study to prove that it is in fact improving memory over time, and that whether it is a digital format versus a physical analog format, I think that there's something about that movement, and it

adds kind of an extra layer of engagement. To me, there's something about having something tangible that is in front of you versus when you take notes in something digital, you just close it out and it's My brain is just kind of like, "Oh, it it doesn't exist anymore. It's it's in the ether." So, there's something about that kind of object permanence that really resonates with my brain with physical notes. Let's transition into how this is relevant as a software developer. So, one practice

that I'll often do is a brain dump at the end of the day. That'll be a complete recap of what I did that day, problems that I encountered, solutions that I'm exploring, etc. And that'll be for any of the problems that I've been working on or, you know, tasks that I'm being given at work. >> [music] >> And this will allow me to pick right back up from where I left off very, very quickly. I find generally a quick scan of my notes the next morning, I got it. Even a week later, I got it. When I'm solving a problem or debugging, I'll

often scribble down my thoughts, question, and then my hypotheses of what might be causing the problem. Uh for this kind of thing, I generally tend to prefer a larger notebook because it allows me to kind of draw things out and have a bit more context on a single page. Um gives me more room to visualize everything, but if it is something that I'm going to end up taking on the go or that I might have to reference while I'm out, I'll either take a photo of it before I leave or I will digitize the notes and use something like org mode to

keep track of a project's status and all of the little tasks that I have to do. But that is a recap for my paper notes system and why I use paper notes, how I take notes in a way that I find is very effective for my learning. And [music] I'll end off with a quick little story of how my university process went, and this is how I learned to pivot how I was taking notes. Because at first, I was like, "Sick, I can use my laptop in the lecture. This is great. We're going to type notes during lecture." And then I

transitioned to handwriting my notes before and during lecture. Again, very similar way where I would read a section and or jot down my understanding of what I've just read. And typically during lecture, you could tell that the professor would emphasize very specific things, and in that case, I would jot those things down. And [music] I also would use it when summarizing lessons afterwards, either in a digital format if it was something that I need to potentially reference for exams. Other

times, I often found that I would just kind of rewrite my not fully rewrite my notes, but I would review the paper notes that I had taken, and I would look at some of the worksheets and stuff that we did before the exam. But [music] generally, at a certain point, I ended up not really doing any digital notes, and instead of doing digital notes, I would actually type up cue cards and use those to study for the exam for recall. And that was something where, you know, whether it was verbatim or not, it kind

of got canceled out by the active recall portion of that study method. So, I did find that very helpful. And I did find that I understood concepts a lot better, and I could remember kind of what my notes looked like during the exam. Whereas when I had typed out my notes, they were not unique to me. I couldn't quite remember that exact lesson. There was, yeah, something about being able to kind of illustrate and have this very free-form physical medium that really my brain thought was very important to remember. So, I felt like I could remember my notes a lot

better during exams. And that is it. That is why I'm taking paper notes while I'm learning a new programming language. Let me know what you thought in the comments, and I'll see you in the next video. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoyed this content, and I will see you in the future. Goodbye.