What could an organization comprised of some of the smartest, most driven people on the planet do with ten billion dollars in a year? Apple increasing their R&D budget five-fold over the past decade is interesting, but the numbers they are talking about are not uncommon in the rest of the tech industry. What I find noteworthy is the comparison with NASA.

It reminds me of the meager resources NASA had when they sent a man to the moon for the first time. We can accomplish amazing things when we put our collective minds to it. And what are Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft doing with their collective billions and billions of dollars in research and development? Building ever more immersive ways for us to share funny cat videos.

It bothers me in a way that so much money is spent on such frivolous things when there are real challenges in the world that our smartest people could be putting their minds to. Could a portion of those billions of dollars be spent figuring out how to get clean water to every person in the world? Or how to overcome drought by filtering seawater?

There are pursuits that are worthwhile and pursuits that are noble, and they are so often not the same thing. Every now and then though, they are. I think what Tesla is doing is both worthwhile from a financial perspective and noble in that by creating technology that relies on clean power they are benefiting everyone. It’s possible that a good sum of Apple’s ten billion is also going towards electric, self-driving cars, but we haven’t seen the fruit of that research yet. Meanwhile, NASA landed a probe on a comet.

This is fantastic, pure Phish. I’m so glad that they’ve just been getting better over the years.

Vibrating with love and light, pulsating with love and light, in a world gone mad, a world gone mad, there must be something more than this!

Perfect.

We humans are complicated creatures. I run for miles at a time, even though I’ve got nowhere to go, and nothing is chasing me, nothing but time and old age. Some people collect stamps, others watch birds; there’s no end to the ways that we occupy our time. Some people write stories, or draw, or paint, or make pottery out of clay. Some people write poetry. My daughter, my oldest, spends her time practicing the ancient art of dance.

Over the years that I’ve been taking her to dance practice and recitals, I’ve spent quite a bit of time pondering the significance of dance. Why do we do it? What sort of purpose does it serve? I’m reminded of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society on why we read and write poetry.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

Poetry, beauty, romance, love… and dance.

Dance, a physical expression of emotion, the rhythmic movement of the human body. The endless, impossible pursuit of perfection.

To dance takes dedication and courage. It takes practicing before the sun comes up and finishing after everyone else has long gone to bed. It takes a willingness to incur injury in pursuit of your art. It takes being able to forget all that and have fun. To lose yourself in the moment, to revel in your ability, gliding from one motion to the next, emotions coming to form like firecrackers on the stage. Body and mind working together in unity.

As I’ve watched my daughter grow up over the years and explore her chosen pastime, I’ve thought deeply on the purpose of dance, and how easy it is for those of us with highly analytical and logical minds to discard or ignore the pure joy of artistic expression. I’ve seen reference to a debate over whether dance is an art or a sport. The question is wrongheaded, dance is both, of course. My daughter has grown to show poise and grace while on the lighted stage, performing before crowds that would freeze lesser individuals with stage fright. After every single performance I’ve seen I come away feeling more proud of her than ever.

This is her senior year of high school, which, one, means I’m officially old now, and two, in a few months she’s going to set out on her own big adventure. I know that with the dedication, courage, and ability she’s developed over the years she is going to be fantastic. While it will be bittersweet to see her leave home, I can’t wait to watch her start to fly. There will be hard times to come, as in anyone’s life, but through it all I hope she never stops dancing.

“Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.”

One of the surest ways I know I’m well on my way to crotchety old man status is not the grey in my hair, but my gut reaction to a certain tradition in our small town. To celebrate homecoming, our high school cheerleaders and dance team spends the night covering the high school football players houses, cars, and possibly yards with toilet paper, saran wrap, and plastic forks. They call it tradition, I call it vandalism, but, like so many other things in this tiny Iowa town, I’m simply outvoted.

One of the oddest aspects of this annual event is that it’s completely legitimized by the adults in town. Some of them even drive the kids around to the different houses. I know TP’ing happened when I was a kid too, but at the time it was done by kids who snuck out at night and did it knowing full well it was illegal and that if caught, they would be in somewhat serious trouble. Last year, one of the local cops helped the cheerleaders throw a roll of toilet paper at a house. It’s like the kids who used to do this on their own grew up and wanted to make sure their kids had the same experience, but in a safe, supervised way.

So tonight teams of cheerleaders and dancers will drive around the area, chauffeured by a few parents, and visit 28 homes. At each of the homes various acts of light-hearted vandalism will occur, throwing toilet paper over the house and trees, wrapping the cars in saran wrap, and maybe even filling up the front yard with plastic forks, known, I’m told, as forking the yard. The kids and parents involved say it’s all in good fun, and I understand that, what I don’t understand is who cleans up the mess after the night is over. TP makes a heck of a mess when it gets wet, and if it rains in the next few days some folks are going to have a heck of a time getting it off their homes and property.

Speaking of it raining, another prank that I’ve been told is reserved for those that really deserve it is to fill the front yard with a few boxes of instant mashed potatoes. After it rains, as I understand it, I’ve never seen this done, the potatoes absorb the water and cover the yard. I imagine the owner would have to shovel it out.

The kids have a great time and get to feel like they are breaking the rules, even though the rules have been temporarily adjusted, so they aren’t actually rebelling at all. I think that’s really where the crux of my issue with this tradition lays. It’s become phony, fake. Like mandatory corporate shuffleboard or trust falls. The kids aren’t really being rebellious; this is all pre-planned, packaged and vacuum wrapped like a lunchable. Sometimes I wonder if we are doing the next generation any favors by protecting them so much. There can be no bravery without danger.

But, it is all in good fun. No one gets hurt, no one is in trouble. No one complains about cleaning up the mess, at least no one I’ve talked to has. Maybe some of the kids from the teams have to clean it up, I don’t know. I’m just the grouchy old man who really wants the kids to stay off my lawn.

My favorite new-to-me site is Farnam Street by Shane Parrish. I’ve been experiencing a slow change of interests over the past several months as Apple and tech related news fails to grab my attention. The last time this happened I lost more than a professional interest in the open source community, an area I left years ago and haven’t looked back. I can’t find it in me to care enough about iOS 10 to read the book-length treaties on it at MacStories, in fact the latest iPhone or iOS barely interests me enough to learn what’s in it and if it is anything of use to me.

I just don’t care anymore. My tools of choice work well, and I’m comfortable knowing that there’s nothing better. Instead, I’m turning my attention to a topic that I’ve been dancing around for the past few years, but haven’t put a concerted effort into, something Cal Newport calls Deep Work. I’ve always been fascinated with how the mind works, and exploring the outer boundaries of the human brain. The psychology courses I took in grad school were among my favorites, and how we think about the world around us is endlessly fascinating.

Farnam Street is chock-full of insight into the human condition, where we fail, and how we can be better. Being a little better every day is exactly what I want to pursue, To that end, I’m in the middle of an experiment right now, once it’s over I’ll report my findings, but my thought is that after 30 days I’ll be more focused, happier, and more productive than when I started. Better.

I’m giving up a few things, and putting my energy into other things, but let’s leave that alone for now and return to this idea of areas of focus. I once considered myself a part of the Apple community. I was a developer for a short time, and a writer for a popular blog. I followed all the right people on Twitter, subscribed to all the right podcasts, and generally knew what was going on in the community of internet famous folks in the Apple community. I still do, to a point, but as I’ve stated earlier, I just don’t care about it anymore. One of the things I’ve given up is the thought that I’m going to be any more of a part of this community than someone on the outside looking in. I don’t have time for such juvenile pastimes, and this hobby was not actually making my life better.

I’ll dip my toes in from time to time to see what’s going on and see if any new developments are coming down that pipes that might make my tools better, but I’m not diving in and swimming in it anymore. Perhaps one day some online technical community will interest me again. Instead I’m taking a more realistic approach to my time, and turning my attention to those things that actually do make me a better person. My plan is to write about those things here.

I just started reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work and I’ve found myself nodding along in agreement through the introduction and first two chapters. His description of the environment needed for intense, concentrated study reminded me of a time I went through a period of deep work, one that is unfortunately difficult to replicate.

Eighteen years ago I was on my second six-month deployment to the Mediterranean on the USS Platte, an auxiliary oiler. It took us two weeks to cross the Atlantic back then, and once in the Med we would spend anywhere from one to three weeks underway between port visits. Everyone in the Navy has a job, and for the first three years I was in the Navy my job was Machinery Repairman, abbreviated “MR”. Along with your job designation, everyone in the Navy has a rate, and my rate at the time was E3, also called “Fireman”, so my title at the time was MRFN Buys.¹

I desperately wanted to make Petty Officer Third Class (E4), the next promotion level. The first three promotions (E1 through E3) are given as soon as you serve the requisite amount of time. The subsequent promotions require testing and a complex scoring system that ranks your performance through reviews. The Navy will have only a certain number of slots open for E4 in each rate (job), so sometimes even if you ace the test, you won’t be promoted because of the “needs of the Navy”. Machinery Repairman was one of those jobs that was saturated at the time. I had taken the semiannual test twice, and twice had not made petty officer third class.

I really wanted to make third. Higher rate meant better pay, and I was newly married with a baby on the way. Working in engineering meant that I spent a lot of my time working in the fire room, where the boilers and other high-pressure steam system equipment lived. It was always hot, I mean really hot, and there was no natural light. We worked in blue overalls with the sleeves rolled up, we took readings on the equipment on a regular schedule, smoked and hoped nothing would break. Sometimes, depending on what else was going on around the ship, we might have to split our shifts on watch down to six and six; six hours on watch, six hours off, and one of those six hours off we had to spend doing our main jobs. So for up to eighteen hours a day I was hot, sweaty, and covered in grease. To be honest, most of the time the rotation wasn’t quite that bad, but from time to time it would be.

When I’d wash my hands and face and head up to the mess decks for lunch or dinner, I’d meet up with some of the guys who had been on the ship for as long as I had who had made rate already and worked in Radio. They’d come down in their crisp, clean dungarees, shiny boondockers with a mirror polish, and complain about how cold it was in Radio. During one of these lunches I decided to cross-rate. The Navy has a system where you can apply to take the E4 test of a different rate. I made up my mind to cross-rate to Radioman, then, I reasoned, I could make rate and get out of the pit.

Cross-rating isn’t easy though. I had to learn an entirely new field of work, and I had to keep up with my existing responsibilities. I filled out all the requisite paperwork, got approval, and started to study. I got ahold of the Radioman 3 & 2 and a thick spiral-ringed notebook and started carrying them with me on watch in the pit. Between times when I had to take readings on the equipment, I focused all of my energy into learning everything I could about the rate, devouring the book while learning about wave propagation and transmitter and receiver theory. I talked some of the senior petty officers into letting me spend some of the time between watches or after my regular job was over up in Radio getting hands-on experience. I had two sets of uniforms in my rack, one for the pit, and one for Radio. I kept this up for weeks.

By the time the test came around, I not only scored high enough to make RM3 (Radioman, Petty Officer Third Class), I blew the test out of the water. The period of intense, focused effort resulted in a major change in my life. After I made RM3 the Navy combined the RM and DP (data processing) rates, creating the new Information Technician rate, who dealt with all of the ship and shore based communications and computer systems. Becoming a Radioman changed my career path from a machinist to what has evolved into devops. It was hard, but my life is immeasurably better because of the work I put in.

After making E4, I turned my attention to the Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist. I spent the rest of the deployment learning about every facet of the ships operation, from the bridge to the engine room, from the main steam cycle to semaphores. I absolutely loved it. My last few months on the ship were the best. Learning how to apply myself diligently to achieve goals is a skill I wish I would have learned earlier in life, but once I did learn it I’ve been able to call on it when I need to. It can be difficult to isolate myself from distractions and focus as a remote knowledge worker in 2016, but I’ve never forgot the lessons of the pit. Hard work, sweat, and diligent, concentrated effort are the keys to success.

Overcast is moving to an ad-supported business model.

Ads are the great compromise: money needs to come from somewhere, and the vast majority of people choose free-with-ads over direct payment. Ads need not be a bad thing: when implemented respectfully, all parties can get what they want.

Overcast is the best podcast client I’ve used. Smart Speed and Voice Boost are fantastic features that Marco clearly put a lot of work into, so I hope he finds a business model that is sustainable enough to convince him to keep working on the app. Being able to say that though has taken some thought and introspection.

I’m envious of Marco’s success. He’s played all his cards right and he’s designed the life he wants to lead; he deserves the success he’s gained. ATP is my favorite podcast, and I used Instapaper almost religiously for years. He’s very good at what he decides to do, so I don’t think it’s any mystery at all that he is where he is.

And yet… and yet… like so many others in this community, I’ve struggled to come up with even one idea with staying power. I’ve released too soon, my ideas weren’t very good, or my execution flawed. As I look at turning 40 in a few short months, I’m finding it harder than ever not to grow bitter at how some make it, but most do not. It’s an unfair, harsh, and unforgiving world out there, and if you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth it’s unlikely you’ll ever know life without struggle.

Unlikely, but not impossible. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

I’ve watched Shawn Blanc grow from a part-time blogger¹ to a self-help coach, running three separate sites and recording online courses. Making enough money in a week to last for a year. Again, he’s smart, he’s found his niche, and he’s worked hard. It’s just not the natural human emotion to feel good about others succeeding where you have not. It takes effort.

Manton Reece talked about this a bit in his post “A great developer can come from anywhere”:

Daniel Jalkut and I had Marco as a special guest on Core Intuition 200 not just because he’s a friend but also because he so well represents the goal that many of us have and our listeners have — to start our own company, to find success not just one time but again and again, and to have as thoughtful an approach as possible in the craft of software development.

I’m tempted to quote the entire article. Manton makes the case that while some people dismiss Marco’s approach to testing as a privilege he enjoys as a byproduct of his success, this concept is poison to the community. Saying “that’s fine for Marco, but it wouldn’t work for the average guy” is giving yourself an excuse not to work as hard or push as hard as needed to make it. It’s important to remember that Marco’s success came after years of mostly anonymous work. And of course, success breeds success, he’s been able to build off of one to make a success of the next.

Manton ends his post by saying:

I’ll never accept the implied negativity in the “that’s fine for Marco” argument. I’ll never accept that we should be jealous of another developer’s success instead of inspired by it to do our best work.

My first reaction to the Overcast announcement was to post a quick tweet about not wanting to help finance Marco’s next Tesla, but that would have come from a place of jealousy and bitterness, not inspiration. Instead, I’m going to go back to my notebook, my collection of ideas, and look over it again.

Another keynote came and went yesterday, and there was nothing I could do after it was over. I couldn’t order the new iPhone 7, or upgrade my current iPhone to iOS 10. I couldn’t buy the new Apple Watch, and even the new iWork collaborative editing features are in new versions “coming soon”. When I tried to download the new Mario game, the App Store let me know I’d be notified when it was available. After everything was announced yesterday, today I’m wondering what the point of having the event when they did was.

There was once a time when you could download new apps or operating systems as soon as the keynote was over. I specifically remember Steve saying more than once “… and it’s available today”. For the past few years we haven’t been getting that. At best the new features are coming in a couple of weeks, or at worst at some undefined time, presumably so far in the future that they can’t nail down a specific date.

It’s good to ship products when they are ready and not at an arbitrary keynote date, but Apple used to be better at coordinating those times to all coincide. By not having anything available on day one, Apple misses out on the consumer excitement it generates by having these events in the first place. At least, I’m not as excited today as I was yesterday. After they keynote was over if I had the ability to order a new Series Two Apple Watch, I almost certainly would have. After giving it a day to think it over, now I’m not as convinced that I need one. I’ll probably wait for the first few reviews to come in and see how much of an upgrade it is.

Perhaps this is another sign of Apple’s confidence and maturity as a massive global corporation. It’s possible that the internal workings of scheduling all the moving parts is impossible to line up correctly. It used to be we only had the one platform and one operating system, the Mac and OS X.¹ Now we have the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple TV; macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, as well as iCloud to tie everything together, and the multiple services Apple provides. Now add the complexities of global shipping and coordinating their retail stores around the world, and I can start to make out why it might not all line up the same as it used to.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that the event came and went, and after it was over there was nothing I could do but read about what’s coming.

iPhone 7

I upgrade every two years on the “S” cycle, so on the off years, like this one, I get a glimpse of what’s coming when I do decide to upgrade. Overall the new iPhone seems like a great upgrade. I think they’ve taken appropriate steps to mitigate the uproar over removing the headphone jack by both including an adapter and setting a reasonable price for replacements. I’ve got at least another year with my current iPhone 6S, so by the time I’m ready to upgrade the story won’t be a story anymore.

More concerning is removing the physical home button and replacing it with a 3D Touch area. This is one of those things that I really hope works well, but since I haven’t been impressed with 3D Touch on the 6S, I’m skeptical of how well it’ll work for the most-used button on the phone. How fast will it respond to double-clicking for the app switcher? The exiting 3D Touch app switcher, where you press on the side of the phone is terrible, I never know if I’m about to damage my phone or what amount of pressure to apply. I find it unreliable enough that I don’t use it. Again, hopefully by the 7S model this will be resolved. Better camera, better color, faster CPU, all good things.

AirPods

I already lost them in the couch. Then another pair went through the wash. I’ll probably not be getting these.

Apple Watch Series 2

I wear a fitbit most days, but I run with my phone strapped to my arm, tracking my runs with the Nike+ Run Club app. When the Apple Watch was first announced being able to run without my phone was the first thing that came to mind, but the hardware wasn’t ready yet. The Watch didn’t have the ability to accurately track distance without GPS, so it still needed to be paired with the phone, which defeated the purpose for what I wanted it for. Now that GPS has finally been added I’m seriously thinking about getting one to replace my fitbit as a personal fitness coach and tracker, but I’m going to want to hear how it works for a few other people first.

That the watch is waterproof now is nice, but not a big deal for me. Sometimes I run in the rain, and not having to worry about my phone getting wet would be nice, but I haven’t swam for a few years. I suppose if I ever start training for a triathlon it’ll come in handy.

I use Nike’s apps, and have for about 1640 miles, but that Nike-branded Apple Watch was just plain ugly. No way I’m putting down any money for that band. The pure white Nike band looks acceptable, but still not as nice as the black sport band.

Assorted Nuts

The enhancements to iWork would have been more interesting to me a few years ago when I was in grad school. I had to write a few collaborative papers, and the only way to do it at the time was Google Docs, but I would have much rather worked in Pages. Of course, I still probably would have had to use Google Docs because the other students I worked with weren’t on Macs.

The Mario game looks like fun, I’ll buy it when it comes out, but what I’m really looking forward to is a proper Zelda adventure. We’ll see how far Nintendo’s commitment to iOS goes.

I could have done without Tim Cook singing, but the skit was fine. Better than previous attempts have been.

I quipped on Twitter that Phil Schiller reminded me of the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz when he started talking about courage. It does take some amount of courage to “push the human race forward”, and if Apple has to do it one port at a time, then I’m on board for the ride. I just think they could have found a better way to come across, a better way to convey their reasoning and the purpose behind the change. I’m not going to miss the port, as long as I’ve got headphones I’m fine, but I use either a bluetooth speaker or the built in speakers more often than the headphones, especially now that I’m not driving to work every day and listening to podcasts in the car.

Yesterday’s announcements were about what was expected, Mario being the notable exception. There was not a lot for me, personally, to get excited about. I’m in the market for a new Mac, so I’m hoping for a refresh next month. Then maybe I’ll get excited.

I started writing this post talking about how I was using DEVONthink, and, as often happens when you write things down, I started thinking critically about how I interacted with the application. I took a folder full of screenshots, walked through some usage scenarios, and checked and double-checked what I was actually doing with the application. Then I exported everything to the Finder.

As of right now, I’m not using DEVONthink. I’ve gone back and forth over this for literally years. I get enthralled with the idea of building this perfect database, where every bit of information I need is at my fingertips, organized and indexed exactly as I want it. Then after a week or two of day to day use I realize that I’ve duplicated everything that I do with the Finder and a handful of other apps in DEVONthink, and decide to simplify.

One of the best things about DEVONthink is that it doesn’t modify your data, it simply organizes it and adds a layer of intelligence to help you manage it. The main selling point is it’s integrated “AI”, a parsing engine that looks for similarities between documents and can present you with connections between topics you may have missed. In this way, DEVONthink is more of an intelligent research assistant than a document management application like the Finder. Unfortunately, over the past several years of going back and forth, using it and not using it, I’ve never found a practical use for the AI.

I wrote earlier this week about how if you want to remember something you should write it down. Personally, I’ve found that I’m not good at this. I’m far more likely to find a way to record information using my Mac of iPhone than I am a notebook, simply because I’ve always got one of the two with me. I am however making a deliberate effort to give myself time to think clearly, stepping away from the computer and staring out the window for a while.

Computers excel at storing and searching information. Humans excel at making abstract connections between disparate bits of information. The best AI in the world can’t help me if I either don’t trust it, or if I don’t understand the connections it’s trying to make. My own brain is far better at making connections if I only give it the materials it needs. In other words, if I actually read and make notes on the information I’m saving. Using several “anything buckets” over the years I developed a bad habit of saving things after skimming through their contents, thinking that I would have it if I ever needed it. In practice though, instead of searching my own personal archive, I would almost always just search DuckDuckGo or Google again. My perfect database becomes a crypt of partially read web archives.

My entire job is managing information. What commands to type in where to get the desired result. Which buttons to click and what code to push to enable my team to get their work done. Every day the Internet is building and rebuilding itself, and my team does their part to help make information available. I even went to grad school for Human Computer Interaction, and learned only that the best way to manage information is “whatever works for you”. Sure enough, what worked for me in grad school was to have a top level folder named “ISU”, and a sub-folder underneath for every class I was in, and then a folder under each class for each assignment, as well as a folder for the videos of all the lectures. The organization was simple and easy to understand.

Again, when I looked through my DEVONthink system, I found that I had recreated everything that the Finder did. I had a database for each major topic or area of life, and folders and subfolders that further refined the topic till I reached the files. For example, my “Research” database contained an “Operating Systems” folder, that contained folders for “Linux”, “BSD”, “OS X”, and “Windows”. My Linux folder contained a folder named “Shared Internals”, and underneath that a folder named “Kernel”. Inside the Kernel folder were documents pertaining to the internals of the Linux kernel.

While I’ve read most of the documents in my database, too many of them I’ve only skimmed. What would be much more useful is a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten can be thought of as a Wiki with short articles. The point being that while I’ve been spending a lot of time organizing files, what I really want out of my computer is knowledge.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m still working through all of this. I haven’t found the one true way to organize your data that I can recommend to everyone. What I learned in school still stands, how you organize your data remains up to you. Whatever works best for you is what you should do.

I think it’s good to have original source material on hand, but that source material is only useful if the information it contains is extracted and incorporated into a personal knowledge base. This has been my mistake for too long, to think that simply by saving and skimming over original source material I can increase my knowledge and effectiveness. Tools like Evernote and DEVONthink encourage this kind of digital hoarding by making it easy to save data, but the truth is that there is still no substitute for doing the hard work required to learn. You have to read, reflect, think it through, and write it down. Maybe on paper, maybe not, but without the intermediary step of synthesizing the information you’ve collected into your own personal system, it’s just more junk that needs to be cleaned up.

If you really want to remember something, write it down. By hand.

There is a growing body of knowledge that shows the benefits of writing things down, and how handwriting is better for learning than typing on a keyboard. It’s unfortunate that these studies come after years of schools pushing to get a computer in the hands of every student, moving quickly to replace pen and paper with bits and bytes.

A 2014 article in the New York Times draws a connection between increased brain activity and handwriting.

When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex.

By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect.

Another article in Science Daily from 2011 reports similar results in a separate study:

Mangen refers to an experiment involving two groups of adults, in which the participants were assigned the task of having to learn to write in an unknown alphabet, consisting of approximately twenty letters. One group was taught to write by hand, while the other was using a keyboard. Three and six weeks into the experiment, the participants’ recollection of these letters, as well as their rapidity in distinguishing right and reversed letters, were tested. Those who had learned the letters by handwriting came out best in all tests. Furthermore, fMRI brain scans indicated an activation of the Broca’s area within this group. Among those who had learned by typing on keyboards, there was little or no activation of this area.

This article in Psychology Today references several studies, focusing mainly on the benefits of cursive writing.

Much of the benefit of handwriting in general comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of drawing letters. In one Indiana University study, researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and “adult-like” than in those who had simply looked at letters. The brain’s “reading circuit” of linked regions that are activated during reading was activated during hand writing, but not during typing.

One of the focuses of my writing here is about the appropriate use of technology to enhance our lives. There are so many things that a computer can do, it’s difficult to know where to draw the line on what we should do. Can we give kids computers and have them type notes in class instead of writing them down? Sure. Should we? It’s looking like the increasingly obvious answer from the scientific community is no. Just because it’s faster doesn’t mean it’s more efficient.

There continues to be no shortcut to deep learning. To know a subject, you must study it closely. To learn math, you must practice, especially the fundamentals. The best way to take notes during a lecture is by hand, forcing yourself to synthesize the information you are absorbing into a compressed form that captures the essential ideas, pushing your mind to concentrate intently. Then, at night, when it’s time to study the information further, transcribe the notes into your computer, rewording and exploring the topic as you go. Maybe even speak your notes out loud to yourself, engaging more of your senses.

My favorite quote I’ve read in the past few days is from the Science Daily article, where associate professor Anne Mangen says:

“Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us. We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects – be it a book, a keyboard or a pen – to perform certain tasks,”

We don’t fully understand the effect widespread use of computers from an early age is going to have on us. It’s important not to lose sight of the real world as we continue to explore the virtual one we’ve created.