The Power of Paper

When was the last time you took a notebook to a meeting? Or scribbled and sketched your way to an idea? Increasingly, the corporate world is divided into physical notebook loyalists and people who can’t remember the last time they picked up a pen.

For laptop lovers, it’s tough to resist the allure of convenience. After all, a study from Princeton University revealed that typing is more efficient. Students asked to type notes from a Ted Talk produced 55% more words than those who were asked to handwrite their notes.

Yet science suggests it’s not time to toss out the notebooks just yet.

If speed and efficiency is all you’re after, there’s no question that typing is the way to go. Dig a little a little deeper and the pen reveals itself to be mightier than the keyboard.

We’re typing without thinking

In 2014, Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) studied a group of people taking notes on computers. What they discovered was that the group struggled to resist the temptation to write down everything the lecturer was saying. As a result, the information wasn’t going in.

Van der Meer explains: “it goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.”

Similarly, a recent study in Frontiers in Psychology also suggests digital-note taking produces armies of typing robots, not A-Grade students. The research team monitored brain activity in students taking notes: those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions that support movement, vision, sensory processing and memory.

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Handwriting is harder work

Writing by hand requires more of the brain’s motor programmes than typing, and therefore makes us work that little bit harder. But is it worth the slog? Sophia Vinci-Booher explains how that extra effort enhances our ability to remember what we’ve written:

“As you’re drawing a letter or writing a word, you’re taking this perceptual understanding of something and using your motor system to create it.”

You might compare it to dreaming up a delicious pasta dish and then creating it in your kitchen: the act of plucking something from your imagination and physically rendering it on a page is a more vivid experience for your brain when done by hand, which in turn helps it stick in your memory.

Handwriting doesn’t have to be linear

Computers make decisions for us. When we write by hand, we have to pay active attention to where we put the words on the page, how to relate concepts to one another (rather than just allowing them to appear before us in a linear fashion). This makes computers faster, but also means we’re relying on a robot to make the links for us, and less on our own grey cells.

Sometimes, this is permissible. Much like those meetings that could have been emails, there’s a whole bunch of emails we send everyday that could have been automated. We don’t need to waste brain space on those.

But we do, and that means we squeeze the important writing moments into time-efficient typing blocks, without using pen and paper to think and plan effectively. What if we gave ourselves more space to step away from the screen and create the perfect conditions for our creative minds?

For some of us, that might mean a reliable pen. For others, it might mean a fun notebook. For me, it’s sheets of A4 plain white paper.

Plain paper’s superpower is its lack of lines. The blank page disrupts our linear thinking process and forces us to link concepts together.

I find plain paper an extremely powerful tool for planning just about anything: articles, projects, life. Constrained by a linear document, we don’t search so hard for the solution, or for the missing links.

When is pen and paper king?

In the Princeton University study, students who wrote their notes by hand experienced a 139% increase in short-term retention of the information they documented, versus those typing their notes on a laptop. They also performed better on average in the exams at the end of the year.

But it stretches beyond performance. From analysing to strategising and scheming to daydreaming, pen and paper has the edge for any creative pursuit.

To determine whether it’s time to pick up a pen, ask yourself: am I thinking, or am I executing?

For thinking tasks, pen and paper helps us make sense of the information on the page and draw connections between the points in the way that typing doesn’t. In execution mode, typing is our most efficient way to get tasks done.

Who knew that the mighty pen still held so much promise? Leave the laptop aside for five minutes today, grab a pen and paper instead and see what shifts.

Author’s note

Recently, I’ve noticed that researching and planning articles on my laptop has not been particularly effective. I sit patiently and wait for the idea to emerge, then move, frustrated, to another task an hour later. Suddenly, inspiration will strike and I’ll frantically scribble it down on a piece of paper, where it virtually forms itself. The typing process to execute the idea is then far more efficient than it was before. When I wondered why this was happening, it suddenly hit me: I’d been wildly underestimating the power of pen and paper. Now I’ve been reminded of its potential, I’m committing to using it more each day.

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