Multiple studies have found that students who take lecture notes on laptops don’t learn as well as those who write with pen and paper. This is partly due to the distracting temptations offered by the internet, and partly because typing encourages verbatim note-taking, rather than paraphrasing, summarising and concept mapping, which are much more

A book was usually copied at length or not at all, and few scholars had the luxury of their own private codex to write in.

Francis Ford Coppola had learned the importance of a ‘prompt book’, a copy of a play’s script which included all the technical notes that would allow the stage manager to run the show. A copy of the script would be unbound, then remounted page-by-page on loose-leaf sheets into which a window had been razored, allowing both sides to be read. The

‘The building of the prompt book took hours,’ Coppola recalled, ‘and the tedious activity of cutting, reinforcing and organising the pages provided many meditative hours during which one could use the other side of the brain to roam over the ideas and essential themes of the playwright’s intention.’

The MRI revealed that the control subject drew portraits using the right posterior parietal area, the brain’s facial-recognition module, with which we recognise people and judge their mood. Ocean was also drawing faces but, that part of his brain was quiet. Instead, the blood rushed to the right middle frontal area, associated with spatial

Paper supplanted papyrus, having ‘a transformative effect’, as Jonathan Bloom, the leading historian of the subject, puts it. For the following four centuries, Persian, Arabic and other Muslim intellectuals raced ahead of their rivals and counterparts in Christian Europe.

Accounts were always bound into ledgers for a similar reason: loose-leaf entries could easily be fabricated, but a ledger with numbered pages became tamper-proof.

So what do we know about expressive writing and how it works? For one thing, it defies our preconceptions about men finding it difficult to process emotions, or women dwelling on them overmuch: multiple meta-analyses of these experiments show no consistent differences between the sexes. The same applies to ethnicity, mother tongue, education,

‘What this would mean is,’ Pennebaker concludes, ‘if I have more working memory, I should do better on exams: and people do. If I have better working memory, I should interact more with my friends, and listen to you when you’re telling me about your problems, and be more present. In a sense, my mind is clearer, I should sleep better – and people