How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

by Sönke Ahrens

Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for following endeavours. Basically, that is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer 2004).

If we look into our slip-box to see where clusters have built up, we not only see possible topics, but topics we have already worked on – even if we were not able to see it up front. The idea that nobody ever starts from scratch suddenly becomes very concrete. If we take it seriously and work accordingly, we literally never have to start from scratch again.

Sometimes we feel like our work is draining our energy and we can only move forward if we put more and more energy into it. But sometimes it is the opposite. Once we get into the workflow, it is as if the work itself gains momentum, pulling us along and sometimes even energizing us. This is the kind of dynamic we are looking for.

Nothing motivates us more than the experience of becoming better at what we do.

Ironically, it is therefore often the highly gifted and talented students, who receive a lot of praise, who are more in danger of developing a fixed mindset and getting stuck. Having been praised for what they are (talented and gifted) rather than for what they do, they tend to focus on keeping this impression intact, rather than exposing themselves to new challenges and the possibility of learning from failure.

the fear of failure has the ugliest name of all phobias: Kakorrhaphiophobia.

The ability to express understanding in one’s own words is a fundamental competency for everyone who writes – and only by doing it with the chance of realizing our lack of understanding can we become better at it.

Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness. Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage space that slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. But we know today that the more connected information we already have, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock to that information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeed limited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information.

The second is what psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe we have become good at it – completely independent of our actual performance (Bornstein 1989). We unfortunately tend to confuse familiarity with skill.

It is not a sign of professionalism to master one technique and stick to it no matter what, but to be flexible and adjust one’s reading to whatever speed or approach a text requires.

These studies also help to solve a puzzle that has bothered psychologists who study creative people. “On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.”

Don’t make plans. Become an expert.

It is a matter of practice to become good at generating insight and write good texts by choosing and moving flexibly between the most important and promising tasks, judged by nothing else than the circumstances of the given situation.

Experts rely on embodied experience, which enables them to reach the state of virtuosity.

To become an expert, we need the freedom to make our own decisions and all the necessary mistakes that help us learn.

According to the Dreyfuses, the correct application of teachable rules enables you to become a competent “performer” (which corresponds to a “3” on their five-grade expert scale), but it won’t make you a “master” (level 4) and certainly won’t turn you into an “expert” (level 5).

Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices. They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation.

Here, we have to thank Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik for her insight and observational skills. The story goes that she went for lunch with her colleagues and was very impressed by the waiter’s ability to remember correctly who ordered what without the need to write anything down. It is said that she had to go back to the restaurant to get the jacket she left there. Much to her surprise, the waiter she admired just minutes ago for his great memory didn’t even recognise her. Questioned about what seemed to her a contradiction, he explained that all the waiters had no problem remembering the orders and matching them with the guests at the table. But the very second diners left the restaurant, the waiters all forgot them completely and focused on the next group. Zeigarnik successfully reproduced what is now known as the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done.

all you really have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read.

When we extract ideas from the specific context of a text, we deal with ideas that serve a specific purpose in a particular context, support a specific argument, are part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use. This is why we have to translate them into our own language to prepare them to be embedded into the new contexts of our own thinking, the different context(s) within the slip-box. Translating means to give the truest possible account of the original work using different words – it does not mean the freedom to make something fit.

It is mainly a matter of having an extensive latticework of mental models or theories in our heads that enable us to identify and describe the main ideas quickly

Whenever we explore a new, unfamiliar subject, our notes will tend to be more extensive, but we shouldn’t get nervous about it, as this is the deliberate practice of understanding we cannot skip.

Sometimes it is necessary to slowly work our way through a difficult text and sometimes it is enough to reduce a ...

In a small but fascinating study, two psychologists tried to find out if it made a difference if students in a lecture took notes by hand or by typing them into their laptops (Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014). They were not able to find any difference in terms of the number of facts the students were able to remember. But in terms of understanding the content of the lecture, the students who took their notes by hand came out much, much better. After a week, this difference in understanding was still clearly measurable. There is no secret to it and the explanation is pretty simple: Handwriting is slower and can’t be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. Because students can’t write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. But to be able to note down the gist of a lecture, you have to understand it in the first place.

Even the best scientists and thinkers are not free from it. What sets them apart is the mere fact that they are aware of the problem and do something about it. The classic role model would be Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories. “I had [...] during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.”

The linear process promoted by many study guides, which insanely starts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about, is a surefire way to let confirmation bias run rampant. First, you basically fix your present understanding as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point, priming yourself for one-sided perception. Then you artificially create a conflict of interest between getting things done (finding support for your preconceived argument) and generating insight, turning any departure from your preconceived plan into a mutiny against the success of your own project.

This is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.

The slip-box forces us to be selective in reading and note-taking, but the only criterion is the question of whether something adds to a discussion in the slip-box. The only thing that matters is that it connects or is open to connections. Everything can contribute to the development of thoughts within the slip-box: an addition as well as a contradiction, the questioning of a seemingly obvious idea as well as the differentiation of an argument.

as soon we focus on the content of the slip-box, disconfirming data becomes suddenly very attractive, because it opens up more possible connections and discussions within the slip-box, while mere confirming data does not.

Extracting the gist of a text or an idea and giving an account in writing is for academics what daily practice on the piano is for pianists: The more often we do it and the more focused we are, the more virtuous we become.

Patterns that help us navigate texts and discourses are not only theories, concepts or the respective terminology, but also typical mistakes we automatically scan an argument for, general categories we apply, writing styles that indicate a certain school of thought or mental models we learn or develop from different insights and can collect like a great and ever-increasing set of thinking tools.

what philosopher Immanuel Kant described in his famous text about the Enlightenment: “Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.”

It makes sense to always ask the question: What is not meant, what is excluded if a certain claim is made? If someone speaks of ‘human rights:’ What distinction is made? A distinction towards ‘non-human rights?’ ‘Human duties?’

The ability to spot patterns, to question the frames used and detect the distinctions made by others, is the precondition to thinking critically and looking behind the assertions of a text or a talk.

“If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” –John Searle

Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that he could only determine whether he understood something if he could give an introductory lecture on it. Reading with a pen in your hand is the small-scale equivalent of a lecture.

Permanent notes, too, are directed towards an audience ignorant of the thoughts behind the text and unaware of the original context, only equipped with a general knowledge of the field. The only difference is that the audience here consists of our future selves, which will very soon have reached the same ...

“The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool,” Feynman stressed in a speech to young scientists (Feynman 1985, 342). Reading, especially rereading, can easily fool us into believing we understand a text. Rereading is especially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more

We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter.

Learning requires effort, because we have to think to understand and we need to actively retrieve old knowledge to convince our brains to connect it with new ideas as cues.

When we try to answer a question before we know how to, we will later remember the answer better, even if our attempt failed

If we put effort into the attempt of retrieving information, we are much more likely to remember it in the long run, even if we fail to retrieve it without help in the end

Instead of reviewing a text, you could just as well play a round of ping-pong. In fact, chances are it would help you more because exercise helps to transfer information into long-term memory

In contrast to manuscript pages per day, a certain number of notes a day is a reasonable goal for academic writing.

Think Outside the Brain

The brain also doesn’t store information neurally and objectively. We reinvent and rewrite our memory every time we try to retrieve information. The brain works with rules of thumb and makes things look as if they fit, even if they don’t. It remembers events that never happened, connects unrelated episodes to convincing narratives and completes incomplete images. It cannot help but see patterns and meaning everywhere, even in the most random things

The brain, as Kahneman writes, is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” (Kahneman, 2013, 79). And a machine that is designed for jumping to conclusions is not the kind of machine you want to rely on when it comes to facts and rationality – at least, you would want to counterbalance it.

Concluding the discussions in this book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinely concerned with what enables human beings to perform the spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.”

A common way to embed an idea into the context of the slip-box is by writing out the reasons of its importance for your own lines of thought.

If I were a psychologist, this book would interest me for completely different reasons than if I were a politician or a debt adviser, or if I had bought it out of personal interest. As someone with a sociological perspective on political questions and an interest in the project of a theory of society, my first note reads plainly: “Any comprehensive analysis of social inequality must include the cognitive effects of scarcity. Cf. Mullainathan and Shafir 2013.” This immediately triggers further questions, which I can discuss on following notes, starting with: “Why?”