That key point from the meeting, the brilliant idea that came to you in the shower, or the insight from your professor’s tangent about protozoa and the Cold War – you’ll remember, right?
We like to think of memory as a vault. But in reality it’s a big, leaky sieve. A generous one, sure. But most of what we toss in slips quietly through the mesh.
And maybe that’s how it’s meant to be. We’re not designed to remember everything. In fact, our brains are wired to forget. Every night while we sleep, they sort and discard the mental clutter in a kind of neurological Marie Kondo-ing. What’s useful is kept. What’s irrelevant gets dumped.
So if we want to really remember something we have to teach the brain that it matters. And the best way to do that is to engage with it. To focus. To write it down.
Not type. Write. Because while typing is fast and efficient, handwriting slows you down – in a good way. It forces you to process, distil, and prioritise. When you write by hand, you’re not just recording information. You’re convincing your brain to keep it.
Neuropsychologist Audrey van der Meer has studied this at length. Her research shows that handwriting activates more of the brain than typing – sparking the kind of deep, distributed activity that supports learning, attention, and memory. It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about cognition.
So how should you take notes? There’s no single right way. But there are a few enduring methods worth trying.
The Cornell Method divides the page into notes, cues and summary. It’s a system that invites review and reflection without the need for colour-coded tabs or digital prompts.
The Outline Method is linear and logical. If your brain likes order, this one feels like snapping Lego bricks into place.
Mind Maps work for the non-linear among us. Start in the middle, draw branches, make connections. It’s less about sequence, more about relationships.
Sketchnoting means using simple drawings, arrows, and symbols that give your notes a visual memory hook. It works even if you can’t draw to save your life.
Start with one. Try another. Eventually, you’ll mix them – everyone does. Like handwriting itself, note-taking becomes a personal style, a hybrid of structure and chaos, lists and diagrams, phrases and arrows. That’s not inefficiency. That’s note-taking fluency.
And those pages you write? Most of them, you’ll never reread. But the value isn’t just in what they preserve. It’s in what they signal. When you write something down, you’re telling your brain: this matters. And sometimes, that’s all it takes to make it stick.