Think Outside the Brain

from

Take Smart Notes

Taking liberature notes is a form of deliberate practice as it give us feedback on our understanding or lack of it, while the effort to put into our own words the gist of something is at the same time the best approach to understanding what we read.

Do they still make sense in writing?

Are we even able to get the thought on paper?

Do we have the references, facts and supporting sources at hand?

References, facts and supporting sources, where are they from? Make them from the slip-box.

The brain alone is too eager to make us feel good - even if it is by politely ignoring inconsistencies in our Thinking. Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance - literally.

We reinvent and rewrite our memory every time we try to retrieve information.

The brain, as kahneman writes, is "a machine for jumping to conclusions". And a machine that is designed for jumping to conclusions is not the kind of machine you want to rely on when it comes to facts and rationality - at least, you would want to conterbalance it. Luhmann states as clearly as possible: it is not possible to think systematically without Writing.

Thinking Process on Paper of Feynman.

"Notes on paper, or on a computer screen […] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible" is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbook of neuroscientist (Levy 2011, 290).

What does this all mean for my own research and the questions I think about in my slip-box?

Why did the aspects I wrote down catch my interest?

By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.