As Greene’s students discovered, the very act of noticing and selecting points of interest to put down on paper initiates a more profound level of mental processing. Things really get interesting, however, when we pause and look back at what we’ve written. Representations in the mind and representations on the page may seem roughly equivalent, when in fact they differ significantly in terms of what psychologists call their “affordances”—that is, what we’re able to do with them. External representations, for example, are more definite than internal ones. Picture a tiger, suggests philosopher
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