Writing is thinking

In the first stage of the journey of TheNomba, there is a transition that almost no one expects. Gregorio Luri's masterclass on the guardian of the threshold (that sum of resistance, laziness, and screens that guards the door of all inner life) ends, and the platform announces the tool to defeat it daily. It is not an app, nor is it a method with an acronym. It is writing. In the next step, Francesc Pujol, professor at the School of Economics and Business of the University of Navarra and author of Writing to Grow, appears, and the journey quickly clarifies what kind of writing this is: one does not write to produce more, nor even to write "better," but for something prior to all of that: attention, coherence, inner listening. That is why the platform placed a small pen next to each video: it is called Elixir, you write, it is saved, you return whenever you want. And that is why, immediately after, it commits the heresy of amending itself: sometimes the digital is not enough. There are days when a notebook is needed. "Paper does not forgive, does not erase, does not scroll."

That a digital school should tell you to buy a pen seems like an extravagance. It is taking a stance in one of the most instructive scientific controversies of the last decade.

The study that wanted to retire laptops

In 2014, two psychologists, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, published three studies in Psychological Science with a western-like title: "The pen is mightier than the keyboard." Students watching lectures, some taking notes by hand and others with laptops. Their conclusion went around the world: those with the keyboard wrote more, but tended to transcribe; those with the pen, forced by their own slowness, had to select and reformulate, and that seemed to translate into an advantage on conceptual questions. The study became an article of faith. Headlines in half the international press, professors banning laptops from classrooms, and a moral installed in general culture: the hand is smarter than the keyboard.

Science, when it works, has an uncomfortable habit: it retraces its own steps.

What the replications say

In 2019, three researchers from Kent State (Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky, and Katherine Rawson) repeated the experiment, adding conditions: hand, laptop, writing tablet, and even a group that did not take notes. Some trends pointed in favor of the hand, but performance did not consistently differ between any group, and the differences shrunk even further when students were able to review their notes. Their conclusion has the prose of someone walking on wet ground: declaring one note-taking method superior "seems premature." In 2021, the major replication arrived, and it is one of the most beautiful stories of recent science. Heather Urry, a professor at Tufts, turned her experimental psychology class into a laboratory: a direct replication, 142 participants, and a paper signed by 88 authors, almost all of them students. The descriptive half of the original survived: laptop users write more words and copy more literal phrases from the professor. The headline died: on the exam, there was no significant difference. Exploratory meta-analyses of eight similar studies pointed the same way.

It would be convenient to close here with a "then it didn't matter." But what stood was more interesting than what fell. In both the original study and the replication, notes with more words were associated with better results, and literal copying of the professor with worse; the latter link, it should be said, was more fragile in the replication. The boundary that matters does not lie between the pen and the keyboard: it lies between transcribing and elaborating. The keyboard does not make you clumsy; it makes you fast, and speed invites dictation. One can think while typing, and one can copy by hand. What one cannot do is think without elaborating.

The brain with 256 electrodes

The underlying question remains: when the hand draws letters, does the brain do something different? In Trondheim, two researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Ruud van der Weel and Audrey van der Meer, put a cap with 256 electrodes on 36 university students and asked them to alternate between writing words in cursive with a digital pen and typing them. The result, published in Frontiers in Psychology in early 2024: when writing by hand, the brain shows much broader connectivity patterns (coherence in the theta and alpha bands between parietal and central regions), precisely the frequencies that literature associates with memory and the encoding of new information. The authors interpret this as evidence that writing by hand favors learning, and they advocate that children should not stop doing so in school.

Fine print, as always in this notebook: in that experiment, no one measured memory or learning (the inference relies on previous literature); they wrote with a digital pen on a screen, not on paper; they copied isolated words, they did not take notes; they typed with a single finger; and the journal later published a critical commentary, which speaks well of everyone. What the study does leave, and it is a lot, is the contrast of gestures: forming a letter is an unrepeatable motor and visual act; pressing a key is identical to pressing any other. If thinking is connecting, the hand, literally, connects more.

Trivial stories

Reducing writing to a note-taking technique would be like reducing reading to a highlighting technique. The journey knows this, and that is why its writing school does not start with notes but with something more disarming: the trivial story. A scene from your day that touched you inside. You write it down just as it happened, and then you ask yourself the only question of the exercise: why did this touch me? There is the entire mechanism, in plain sight. You write, and, in writing, you discover what you think; the sentence that resisted you was a thought that did not yet exist. In the next step, Fabrice Hadjadj reminds us that Cervantes' stories do not pull us out of reality, but rather expand it, and leaves a challenge that works at any age: suppose for a moment that you are Cervantes. What trivial story could you write today with what is closest to you?

Anyone who goes through the entire journey will discover that its most repeated instruction is not "watch the video." It is another, almost liturgical, that reappears after Rome, after Hume, after every virtue: make silence, and write. We already recounted here what the science of attention measures: according to researcher Gloria Mark, an average of forty-seven seconds in front of a screen before switching focus. Writing is the opposite technology, an anchor. Until the sentence is finished, you cannot leave.

What no one can deliver for you

And here the old war of the laptops becomes small, because the keyboard is no longer the rival. We already recounted in this notebook a preliminary MIT Media Lab study, not peer reviewed and with only 54 participants: in the first session, 15 of the 18 who wrote an essay with the help of ChatGPT could not correctly quote, minutes later, a single sentence from their own text. Writing and thinking seemed to be synonyms, and AI has revealed that they are not in the most pedagogical way possible: by keeping one of the two. Delegating writing is legitimate in a thousand professional contexts. Delegating it always means forgetting, slowly and painlessly, what you thought about things. Or if you were thinking at all.

Therefore, in the university itinerary of TheNomba, the journey flows back to where it began: in a notebook. The final project can be an essay written without AI about whatever the journey has stirred in you, and the rule exists not because the tool is suspicious, but because what is requested there is precisely what no one (and now nothing either) can deliver for you. Twelve stages later, the tiny pen next to the first video turns out to have been a statement of intent. The two schools, the millenary and the one of the electrodes, end up saying the same thing with different vocabulary. Writing does not come after thinking. It is the way thinking finishes existing.

There remains the gesture with which the journey puts it to the test from day one, and it requires no talent, no time, no topic. A notebook, a pen, a scene of the day that touched you inside. Paper does not forgive, does not erase, does not scroll. And every stroke counts.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.