Why I Recommend Students NOT Take Notes

If you try to keep information close by taking great notes that you can reference all the time... that just PREVENTS you from truly retaining it.

Note-taking is ultimately just “following along,” and “following along” is NOT learning.

If you define learning as a positive change in long-term memory, then you haven’t learned unless you’re able to consistently reproduce the information you consumed and use it to solve problems.

This doesn’t happen when you just “follow along,” even if you take great notes and understand perfectly.

It’s the act of retrieving information from memory that transfers the information to long-term memory.

Each time you successfully retrieve a fuzzy memory, it stays intact longer before getting fuzzy again.

But if you don’t practice retrieval, then this doesn’t happen. The information quickly dissipates.

It stays with you only briefly – just long enough to trick you into thinking it’ll stick with you, when it’s really on the way out the door.

And here’s the kicker: if you try to keep the information close by taking great notes that you can reference all the time… that just PREVENTS you from truly retaining it.

That might seem counterintuitive, but it’s actually pretty obvious.

What’s the thing that transfers information to long-term memory?

Retrieving from memory.

When you take great notes and constantly refer back to them, you know what you’re NOT doing?

Retrieving from memory.

Let me be 100% clear: retrieval is NOT just any “loading” of information into your brain.

Retrieval is the specific action of “pulling” information from one part of your brain (long-term memory) to another part of your brain (working memory).

It’s like your brain is “lifting a weight” off the ground of long-term memory and raising it up into working memory.

The fuzzier the memory, the heavier the weight… but just like weightlifting, as you practice lifting heavy weights, you get stronger.

By “getting stronger,” I mean that your brain is more easily able to activate the pattern of neurons that represent the information stored in long-term memory.

Yes, these are analogies, but they are damn good representations of the mechanics that are actually taking place at a physical level in your brain.

If you load information into working memory by looking at reference material instead of pulling from long-term memory, then you’re not strengthening your retention.

It’s like you’re going to the gym to lift weights, but you’re just going through the motions and letting your spotter lift the weight for you. No strength is being developed.

Now, if this hasn’t convinced you that you need to engage in retrieval practice, then let me describe the fate that awaits you.

If you don’t engage in retrieval practice, you end up throwing yourself into a vicious cycle of forgetting:

• You take notes because you can't remember things.
• You can't remember things because you're not transferring them to long-term memory.
• You're not transferring them to memory because you're not practicing retrieving them from memory.
• You're not retrieving them from memory because you're always looking back at your damn notes!

As you spiral into this vicious cycle of forgetting, your whole learning process completely falls apart.

The reference material becomes a crutch, and you’re lost without it.

You miss out on making connections and understanding things deeply.

You learn slower, and forget faster, until eventually you grind to a halt.

You might think it’s because you’re not doing enough review problems, when it’s really because you’re not doing those review problems properly, pulling information from memory.

The only way to break this vicious cycle of forgetting is to engage in retrieval practice.

Initially, that may seem like a paradox: “how can I engage in retrieval practice if I’m unable to retrieve?”

But it’s not a paradox at all. Back to weightlifting – you just need to treat the reference material like a spotter.

You try your hardest to lift the weight – but if you can’t, the spotter intervenes, giving you just enough assistance to get you over the edge of lifting the weight. The spotter should be doing as little as possible while ensuring that you manage to eek out a successful rep.

In the same way, you should try your hardest to recall information – but if you can’t, then it’s okay peek back at your reference material. Just make sure to only peek once, and then try to solve the rest of the problem (or get as far as possible) without looking again.

The goal is to wean yourself off of reference material, using it as sparsely as possible, until you don’t need it at all.

This may be very challenging if you’ve been relying on reference material as a crutch, but it’s the only way out of the vicious cycle.

And you know what helps you wean yourself off of a crutch? Not having easy access to it. Not taking notes.

Here, I’m assuming you can always go back and look up information if you need to – e.g., revisit a textbook or webpage.

If you’re in some special situation where a professor is lecturing off the top of their head, and that information cannot reasonably be found elsewhere, then okay, I guess you should take notes –

not because you’ll learn from note-taking, but rather because you’ll have no way to engage in retrieval practice without the notes (you need some way to look up information if you forget).

But that situation pretty rare.

My point is that as long as you have a reasonable way to look up a piece of information if you forget it, then it’s not worth optimizing for convenience:

• Reason 1: You WANT it to feel annoying to look stuff up, so that you're incentivized not to have to do that.
• Reason 2: If you're engaging in proper retrieval practice, you won't have to spend much time looking stuff up anyway.

Okay, now that I’ve made my point, I want to close with one caveat.

I want to make a distinction between “note-taking” and “listening on paper.”

While I do NOT recommend transcribing information for later use, I don’t think there’s any issue with jotting down key bits of information to maintain focus and draw connections while being presented with new material.

“Listening on paper” is not necessary or even helpful for all students, but some find that it helps them engage in “active listening” and deepen their processing of the material being learned.

Again, however, a student who practices “listening on paper” must always take care to avoid the following pitfalls:

• Pitfall 1: Transcribing, or, more generally, slowing down the rate of ingesting new information without actually deepening the processing of that information.
• Pitfall 2: Solving problems alongside notes, or, more generally, using a reference as a crutch to avoid or reduce effort towards proper retrieval practice.