And Why Journaling with Pen and Paper Frees Up the Information Superhighway in Your Head

The aging brain could use a serious boost as the digital age hurtles along. And as it turns out, so does the increasingly forgetful young brain. If forgetting is for the old, then aren’t we aging rather too fast? Perhaps we have become so dependent on our modern gadgets’ memory that we have taken for granted our own rather equally fragile and powerful human one. And yet in a time when we are bombarded with information, and options for storing information seem endless and ridiculously easily available, the ability to remember is, for all intents and purposes, even more important. Because you know what? Forgetting is easy. At least as far as 19th-century German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus was concerned. Over a hundred years ago, Ebbinghaus conducted experiments on himself to understand how memory works. Then he plotted the graph that illustrated the rate at which something is forgotten after it is initially learned—the forgetting curve. Ebbinghaus’s takeaways are as follows:
  • We promptly forget what we learn within the first hour.
  • We lose an average of 60% of the information we process within the first 20 minutes.
  • We lose most of the information we take in within the first 8 hours, after which our memory eventually levels off.
So how to deal with the forgetting curve in the digital age? Not surprisingly, fighting digital distractions with digital solutions is one way to go. And then there is that age-old activity of writing by hand—mourned by many educators, learning experts, and handwriting fans for having fallen by the wayside as we key-punch our way through our workdays or schooldays, even on our rest days. Because it turns out, pen and paper can go a long way in saving our memory for us, despite our “efforts” to sabotage it. Writing by hand boosts your memory, whatever your age. It stimulates the brain’s reticular activating system (RAS), which filters out the unimportant bits so we can tackle the task before us with precision focus. Typing on a keyboard doesn’t have this same effect on the RAS; rather, it results in shallower processing, according to Princeton University researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer. Typing may help us write much quicker, but the pace at which we write by hand changes the way we encode information, demanding that we think just a bit more—more clearly, more astutely—and remember better. Journaling about our thoughts and experiences; writing down our personal, work, or study notes; dashing off letters to people we like having in our lives—all are great ways to start keeping some healthy distance from the keyboard and the screen. So start stacking up on pens and great notebooks. And if you want a customized journal, we have options for you.

What the hand does, the mind remembers. —Maria Montessori

This is our second article in our series on the benefits of writing by hand. Come back soon for more!
  Related: The Multilayered Benefits of Writing by Hand Writing by Hand Helps You Get Better at Learning