I took the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations) in 1992 and enrolled in a GRE prep course to improve my scores. I did terribly on the SAT and hoped a course would help me improve. One thing that stood out was the instructor’s claim that using a calculator has been proven to lower your math ability because the electrical impulses it sends through your fingers affect your brain. Needless to say, the course didn’t help me much. I still did poorly.
I did, however, get into a graduate program for Applied Psychology. It was a terminal degree, but I still hoped to get into a PhD program after I finished. I didn’t make it past a master’s degree. One thing I discovered while studying for exams in grad school was that if I manually wrote sections of the class textbooks, I retained the material better than just highlighting and reading. One of my classmates’ textbooks was mostly yellow or pink. He also had a hard time retaining what he read.
My wife, for some reason is invested in me keeping up with my daily writing and gave me the idea to write about the trend of people moving away from technology and doing manual notes instead of adding them on your computer or phone.
She’s discovered the Field Notes trend on YouTube and has been watching numerous videos about pocket note-taking. Or I should say, we have been watching YouTube videos about the subject. It’s kind of counterintuitive to watch digital media about doing analog things. But that seems to be the world we live in now.
As an aside, I used to buy LPs and immediately record them to cassette so I wouldn’t degrade the vinyl and could listen to it only on special occasions. Also, I once followed the Grateful Dead, and collecting concert recordings was also a thing. I would make a duplicate cassette copy and save one as a master so I would have one that wouldn’t degrade.
So each has advantages and disadvantages. Writing manually seems to help you retain info, but it degrades over time unless you digitize it. Unless it’s in a compressed format like a JPEG, which loses quality with each save. Then I discovered .shn and .FLAC files that shrank the file size but not the quality. Then all that stuff seemed to disappear.
I will find the recent studies on manual writing for information retention in tomorrow’s entry.