It’s official: the best way to make your travel memories stick is writing them down by hand.
When I first started writing for Wheel & Anchor, I was fresh from being a professional travel writer – and I felt like I knew the danger that cameras face to our travel memories, as I wrote here:
“When you arrive in a new place, when something spectacular appears in front of you, or when happy chance puts you in exactly the right place at the right time for an experience nobody could ever predict – make sure you do nothing.
Just watch. Just listen. Take it all in, for at least 30 magical seconds.
Forget posterity. Forget legacy. Allow yourself to enjoy the moment – a half-minute of pure, delicious selfishness.
In doing so, you’re using the most powerful piece of technology ever created for humans, the 3-pound supercomputer that sits right behind your eyes – and it’s capable of capturing experiences in ways that photography or video will never achieve.”
I still think this is mostly right, and I haven’t read any scientific papers that contradict it. It’s definitely worth experiencing your travels first with your senses, with their incredible ultra-ultra-HD resolution and immersive actual Surround-Sound and everything else you could never buy in the shops because we haven’t built technology that replicates it yet, and then, and only then, trying to “back up” that experience with your gadgets. Biology before technology, and all that. Let your brain have the best of all the available fun.
But of course, that’s easy to say and hard to do. The future is here, and it’s made of the gadgets we use every day, and by & large, this is a great thing. Our ability to digitally record what we experience has never been richer, crisper and longer-lasting.
But here’s a thing that surprised me. I used to think that once you’d experienced something yourself and were ready for the recording-for-posterity stage, it didn’t really matter how you did it. The main thing was what you recorded, and how often you returned to that record to embed and reinforce the information in your head, until you’d fully seared it into your memory for all time. Any tool would do, as long as you ticked those two criteria. A camera, a camcorder, a tapped-out Facebook post, an Instagram video – all more or less good enough for the job, surely?
That would be great news for all us gadget-obsessives (and, of course, for the tech companies that keep us hooked on them). Not that our love of tech really needs excusing as such, but – putting aside the problems with their addictive nature and the tendencies for some big companies to do problematic things in pursuit of a profit, surely the devices themselves are designed to be as intuitive as possible and therefore, logically speaking, must be the quickest, most efficient and consequently most effective way to learn and remember anything? Wouldn’t that make perfect sense?
Recently, a team headed by Audrey Van der Meer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology decided to put this to the test.
They recruited 36 students in their early 20s – in other words, true digital natives at home with using tablets, smartphones and laptops – and attached electrodes to their heads to measure the electrical activity in their brains. Then they asked them to record the words they saw flashed on a screen in front of them – with half the group writing the words down using pen & paper, and the other half typing them out.
The authors of the study concluded:
“When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning.”
What I hadn’t considered until I read these findings (via New Scientist’s recent reporting on it) was our body’s role in the recording process.
In terms of what your hands are doing, there is a huge difference between typing a word and writing it. When you type, it’s much the same physical action happening – maybe a bit of variation with what finger or hand you use to hit which key, and a little pivoting of your arms or wrists as they move over the keyboard, but that’s about it. You make nearly the same exact motion to type every key on a keyboard – which is why they’re so strongly associated with repetitive stress injury.
And tablets & smartphones? You can be hardly moving at all, frozen in place apart from a couple of your fingers doing all the work – and, perhaps more importantly, you’re using those fingers in almost precisely the same way for each letter you type.
Most of us can type much faster than we can write because we’re moving our bodies much less, which seems like a huge win in efficiency terms. But it seems the cost of that is we’re shortcutting our body’s role in helping us think and remember what we’re typing. That’s what handwriting is: it’s the slower, more physically arduous and complex way, but that physical demand upon us seems to be serving a really useful cognitive purpose. It’s just how we learn things properly.
(I bet you know someone who thinks best when they’re on their feet. Here’s an example from science writer Annie Murphy Paul’s newsletter.)
That is the persuasive suggestion with this study. It’s a small sample size – but it definitely tallies with other work done elsewhere, such as this study from the University of Tokyo in 2021 (which also found the participants using paper completed the test about 25% faster than those who used digital tablets or smartphones, because of the creative freedom that paper gave them).
What does it mean? That you should fling your phone and your iPad out the window?
Not a bit of it. These are still the quickest ways of capturing what we experience, in terms of raw words-per-minute or footage-per-hour. But when you’re using your memory effectively, you don’t want to be efficient (meaning “fast”) if it’s at the expense of the way writing has trained our minds to work over thousands of years. If you do that, your memories won’t stick. And isn’t the whole point to be able to recall them at will, for the rest of your life?
Instead, unless you’re unusually attuned to your modern devices, you should do a lot of your thinking and memory-encoding with paper. Or something that works exactly like paper – which is where I breathe a sigh of relief that I can still use my very clever reMarkable2 writing tablet, because it’s really been helping me get my thoughts straight even since I bought it. (Now I might know why it seems to work so well.)
Someone who would definitely agree is British actor and comedian Michael Palin. More or less continuously since the late 1960s, Palin has written a daily entry in his diary – all the way through the early years of Monty Python, through the making of Monty Python & The Holy Grail, Life Of Brian and all the other film projects the Pythons were involved in (it’s nice to see Time Bandits appearing in its next incarnation right now!) and all the way to Palin’s career shift in the late 80’s into travelling the world with a BBC film crew in tow.
He’s now turned these diaries into a series of books – the fourth is coming out next month – and I’ve really enjoyed working my way through them. Part of the fun is just how relentlessly ordinary his extraordinary life has been at the daily level – filled with meetings, anxieties, arguments, trips on the train to film That Famous Scene from That Film (which is startling, because you realise that it actually wasn’t filmed in some fancy studio somewhere, but halfway up a mud-spattered hillside in Wales in between flurries of rain, or in the dingy depths of a real-life castle in Scotland, complete with a crowd of curious gawkers)…
And when it was time to publish in book form his travels for his BBC documentaries including Around The World In 80 Days, Pole To Pole and Full Circle – well, he could just check his diaries. It was all in there!
So, please keep your camera and phone at the ready. They’re just as useful as they ever were. But if you want those travel experiences to stay fresh in your mind for decades to come, bring a nice pen and a good, firm notebook that can take a bit of wear & tear.
It turns out the oldest way was the best all along.