490. The Notebook’s Mighty Place in History with Roland Allen

Ever considered how something as simple as a notebook could shape history?

Roland Allen from Thames & Hudson chronicles the substantial history of a humble tool in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper which traces the roots of jotting things down all the way back to medieval Florence and beyond. 

Roland and Greg chat about the earliest forms of notetaking on things like papyrus and wax tablets, the great thinkers in history who were prolific notetakers, and the enduring importance of writing things by hand in a digital world. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Giotto
• Petrarch
• Zibaldone
• Erasmus
• John Collett
• Samuel Pepys
• Bob Graham

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Profile on LinkedIn

His Work:

• The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Episode Quotes:

Why writing by hand engages your brain

29:18: The brain, as you know, it's all about connections. It's not about really what one part of the brain does; it's about how different modules in the brain relate to each other. And when you write in a physical notebook, you activate more parts of the brain than when you type. So, for instance, you tend to activate the hippocampus, which is your mental map, and you activate that when you're writing in a notebook. And they reckon this is because a notebook isn't just a thing; it's also a kind of place. And so, when you put an idea on the page, you're locating it on this kind of mapped reality, which is the pages of your notebook. And if you think about this, when you're flicking through a notebook, you quite often think to yourself, "Oh, I know this is on the left side at the bottom," or, "I know this was in blue, not black," or, "I know that it was a doodle in a corner of the page." And you don't get that when you're typing. And they think it might be to do with the fact that, as you scroll up, or as your document scrolls up the screen away from whatever it is—the leading edge of what you're typing—it just vanishes into the machine.

Why slowing down improves your writing

26:57: It is much easier to tap into a laptop. It's much easier to edit on a laptop. And it's much easier to word process, produce a thousand words of text on a laptop. But to make it good takes work, and if the process of writing is a little bit difficult if you're forced by the labor of handwriting, which is slow and hard work, to actually think through every word carefully as you order it, as you make your sentence, this I think is a really good discipline, and it will give you better quality results.

The power of handwritten note taking

28:12: When you're note-taking, there's a real advantage to the physical labor of picking a phrase, a sentence, a reference; you excerpt it, you choose it. And because it takes that two minutes to write down a long quote or something like that, or longer, you have to focus on every word as you do it. You can't just control C, control V. Yeah, or Apple C, Apple V, all of the quotes you need, and just dump them into your document. If you do it by hand, you digest them. You get to know them. And that's the best way, I think, to understand something that's been written by someone else—to copy it out because you have to really engage with it.