Hey guys,
nice to see such vibrant and interesting discussions about learning techniques!
I would like to get your opinion on the topic of note-taking and how it relates to memorizing stuff.
On the one hand it seems that there is nothing wrong with taking notes. A lot of people in the productivity areas claim that when they write things, they do not lose them, it helps them to keep track of things, planning, etc. Usual arguments in favor of zettelkasten, note-taking.
On the other hand I also notice problems with excessive note-taking. When people start to outsource some skill to the external tool (like navigation tool outsourced to the google maps on my phone). And this is what I notice in myself. When I start to rely on external sources for keeping track of things, it seems great that I have somewhere systematic way to manage my stuff. But I also feel that i’m outsourcing memorizing and learning to external tool, and also, after years of “only” taking notes, I don’t feel much smarter - like my abilities to manage multiple things in my head weakened and whenever I need to concentrate and “juggle” stuff in my mind, I don’t feel as strong as used to in high, when I rely mostly on memorizing and recalling stuff (or maybe that’s just false nostalgia for the past?).
There are benefits to it but I think it has to be done correctly (which most likely I have not been doing yet).
So I want to ask you about the opinion - how do you do note-taking together with memorizing stuff? What are your experiences here, what worked for you and what wasn’t so great?
As long as you are notetaking and NOT transcribing it’s great. In fact I consider it the first step before memorisation.
Because good notetaking means that you are already thinking, processing and organising information.
There would not be much benefit in memorising information you haven’t already processed - although you don’t need to understand it entirely, since when you learn there are going to be things you don’t understand yet, it’s perfectly normal.
Now if you’re talking about calender, appointments, etc. I see no point in memorising that (especially since it’s information that won’t stay relevant for long). In that case, the effort of memorising isn’t worth it, better have a good system.
As for navigating with Google maps instead of reading the map yourself, I’m not sure what it has to do with memorisation (rather navigation is a skill that you have to train) - but if somebody uses Google maps in their car to concentrate on the driving and roads, it’s not always a bad thing. When people complain about GPS in cars they sure don’t remember the lost time, screaming children and fights about which roads are the best. While I think it’s extremely useful to still learn to read a map and navigate it doesn’t mean that it has to happen all the time.
In short, I’m skeptical that those who take a lot of notes actually are able to organize them effectively and review them.
The problem with notes is that most are hardly read, and this is more true the more notes you have. So you write something down with the feeling you are doing something useful, but then you forget about the note and your whole collection of notes grows and grows into a vague “I don’t know what’s in here but all of it seems useful.” So you basically give up memorizing and internalizing information for a pretend-memorizing in the form of notes you’ll definitely think about more later (but never end up doing).
Let’s say then that you try highlighting relevant info you want to look over more later instead then. But then eventually there will be so much highlighted info that the same problem will happen again.
Since you’ll naturally forget about what your past notes say as quantity increases, you will begin repeating yourself in your notes while still thinking you’re doing something useful. Labelling doesn’t fix this problem, because you won’t have time to reread all the notes under that label everytime you want to type a new note under that label.
The only way to fix this problem is by not relying heavily on notes, and instead using notes as a ladder you quickly throw away to actually memorize and connect new knowledge with what you already know.
I think this is good advice. Taking overly complete notes is a serious distraction from the processes of understanding, evaluating and encoding incoming information for storage. Cognitive load theory calls this type of thing “extrinsic” load – mental effort and working memory diverted to tasks which are superfluous to understanding and storing the information in memory.
In college I used mind maps and tried to stay terse. Occasionally these days I’ll use shorthand-like script (Stenoscrittura) to capture technical notes, but sparingly and in a very terse way. Usually I just listen.
One interesting notetaking method developed for consecutive interpretation is Rozan’s notation, a way of capturing the gist of real-time speech in a cryptic-looking compressed form with arrows and a few other symbols.
I hadn’t thought it expressed like this but it’s true that I have two kinds of notes.
First kind is in the situation where I will keep them (at least for a while, because I will have to present a summary to others, or permanently, in which case I’m doing a “Zettel” in obsidian).
Second kind is the situation where I take notes which I know I will not read again. It’s a bit counter intuitive to write when you know you’re going to throw it away but the act on writing (by hand) the key points means I’m following the “narrative arc”/ structure of the person talking more easily, it helps me to stay focused and to ask myself: among all these interesting ideas which are the 1-3 points that are the most useful for me?
For both kind of situation I don’t write everything but just key words / references, often in mind map form. I figure that if I understood what was said, then I can reconstruct the ideas/illustrating stories based on the key words. If it’s not enough then I’d need to study the subject more by other ways.