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Chapter 17 ‘But 18 pence in money; and a table-book’
Chapter 18 Albetrosses
Chapter 19 ‘I think...’
Captain FitzRoy was ordered to return to the Southern Ocean, he looked about for a shipmate whose conversation would not be constrained by naval discipline or rank: ‘a companion,’ he wrote, who ‘should share my scientific tastes, make good use of the expedition’s opportunities for naturalism research,
Just after Christmas 1831, Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle.
Darwin was well accustomed to thinking problems through on the page. He confidently dedicated different notebooks to different intellectual functions: his field notebooks worked as immediate aide-memoires; in his journals, he constructed the narrative of his life’s events and his emotional responses; and in the ‘Red Notebook’ and the lettered notebooks – sometimes known collectively as the ‘transmutation notebooks’ – he gave his imagination free rein, posing questions to himself and recording his train of thought without inhibition (or syntax).
make copious rough notes in a waste book or field notebook, then transfer them carefully to more organised documents, analysing them and thinking questions through on the way.
Darwin’s story. Scratching quick, incoherent notes onto their tiny pages, he had used his field notebooks to prompt observation, interrogation and judgement of what he saw. Back on board the Beagle, Darwin turned these raw materials – just one hundred thousand telegraphic words – into nearly two thousand pages of systematic scientific notes, and an evocatively detailed diary. Then, in the ‘Red Notebook’ and its successors, he processed the arguments and ideas which would, in the six books he published in the decade after his voyage, make him one of the era’s most respected scientists – and
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Process seems very similar to the stages in note taking proposed by Ahrens.
Chapter 20 One way to immortality Diaries and journals, 1600–present
Chapter 21 ‘You’re spot on’ Police notebooks, 1829–present
He tells me the real reason why the notebook (or pocket book, or memo book) had been an obligatory part of the constable’s kit
Those uniformed constables were not turned out onto the streets to wander at will: their role, defined with the creation of London’s Metropolitan Police in 1829, was built on ‘the beat’, a walked loop of about an hour’s duration, which could not be varied.
Chapter 23 Preserving and Coockery Recipe books, 1639–present
Chapter 24 Express yourself Journaling as self-care, 1968–present
Was there something, apart from their sexual nature, which distinguished these traumas from others, such as injury or bereavement? Pennebaker circled around the question before settling on a crucial difference: victims were much less likely to talk to other people about sexual traumas than other kinds.
He brought participants to the lab and, based on the toss of a coin, asked half of them to confide a major trauma, not to an interviewer, but on paper, in fifteen-minute sessions.
he then tracked their visits to the student health centre in the months before and after the study. The results were dramatic:
The correlation, he would later write, was ‘exceptionally powerful’, and unambiguous: ‘when people write about upsetting experiences it has a positive health effect upon them.’
Pennebaker called ‘expressive writing’.
multiple meta-analyses of these experiments show no consistent differences between the sexes. The same applies to ethnicity, mother tongue, education, social status and age: children, maximum-security prisoners, pensioners, students, professionals – everyone enjoys similar benefits.
Using language of insight (‘now I realise that…’) or cause (‘one consequence was that...’) in your writing is a sign that you’ve processed your emotions so they will stress you less in future. On the other hand, writing that just recounts the facts of a trauma, without an acknowledgement of its emotional effects, won’t be effective.
If you experience fresh trauma, when should you start to write about it? The research suggests that you shouldn’t rush to put pen to paper: one to two months after the event is probably best, but no sooner. And there’s no difference between writing completed in one day, or over several days or weeks.
It’s known as the A-to-D emotion theory, in which ‘analogue’ emotions (non-verbal, woolly, hard to organise, imprecise) are turned into ‘digital’ (verbal, cognitive, easy-to-organise) chunks.
‘Your writing goes from more emotional to more cognitive,’ Elizabeth Broadbent, who had led the New Zealand study, puts it. The more care we take to identify differences between our negative emotions, the more likely we are to understand them, and act effectively in the future. The
Pennebaker also stresses the importance of working memory,
So is regular diary-keeping a good habit, or not?
But Pennebaker’s own subjects included many habitual diary-writers, and he observed no difference in their results compared to those of their peers.
For every person who uses their diary to process their emotions, naming them and making them easier to manage, another may recycle unhappy memories without taking the necessary cognitive steps to move on.53
Chapter 25 Blue, green, red, yellow
Most farmers, in fact, used similar notebooks, which were usually branded giveaways from fertiliser or seed salesmen.
Graham was taking action. Librarians in Florida dug through the cartons and discovered that the CIA’s account was, to put it mildly, hogwash. Three of the four claimed meetings hadn’t happened at all, and although the subject of interrogation had come up at the fourth, there had been no mention of waterboarding. This blew a major hole in the CIA’s
Bob Graham’s notebooks had again made the news.
As TV commentator Rachel Maddow put it: ‘Nerds one, spies zero’.
Chapter 26 Non-trivial Climate logs, ...
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In the 1970s, nurses there had realised that patients needed to recover from intensive care, as well as in it, and it was they who started keeping patient diaries as a way of helping their patients make sense of their experiences.
They came up with a beautifully simple practice: each day, a nurse writes an informal diary entry telling the patient what they have done, what has been done to them, and how they are. ‘We try to put ourselves into the patient’s place and describe what is happening, and how we think the patient is experiencing it,’ as one nurse puts it. The diary contains no medical information.
When the patient recovers and is discharged from the ICU, they are given the diary to take away, and with it they can piece together their fragmented memories,
Patients’ families soon became involved in the diary-keeping: visiting relatives were encouraged to leave their own observations and thoughts alongside those of the professionals’,
Carl Bäckman, a Swedish specialist, came up with the idea of adding photos of the patient, so that they could see what their treatment looked like, and where their new scars had come from.
When Jones collated her own results, she found that keeping a diary for a patient cut the risk of PTSD by over 60 per cent, prevented panic attacks, flashbacks and nightmares, and reduced anxiety and depression.
