The Notebook

In systematising the arrangement of information, Erasmus’s common-place – just as merchants’ ledgers had revolutionised finance – turned the notebook into information technology, a piece of hardware in which data could be stored, categorised and retrieved as necessary.

Solso’s experiment, subsequently replicated and refined, changed the way we think about artists at work. It showed that to create a realistic, figurative image, one that ‘looks like’ the subject, you have to do something that doesn’t come naturally, and – if you’re painting a portrait – actively disengage the parts of the brain that instinct tells

As Europeans explored further, published more books, traded more goods, generated more paperwork, and in general made life more complicated for themselves, sorting information into manageable chunks enabled them to understand their world.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote, a century after Cennini: And take a note… with slight strokes in a little book that you should always carry with you… preserved with great care; for the forms, and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, wherefore keep these sketches as your guides and masters.

In another major step, the ledger defined an accounting period, turning twelve months into one financial year. Yet another was the concept of algebraic opposition – the relationship between assets and liabilities which Manucci reconciled with his careful credit and debit entries.

Gibson set to work on a new theory of perception, which included the concept of affordance: that aspect of an object which makes the object useful to a human interacting with it.

The arrival of paper notebooks and zibaldoni changed that, but they were, as we have seen, mostly recreational in nature, and very few had any organising principle beyond what their owner happened to enjoy.

What would traditionally be seen as property crime may instead count as a crime of violence. And it helps to explain the strange strength of the bonds that we form with our notebooks and diaries if we understand them to be extensions of our minds, parts of our belief and cognitive systems that happen to reside outside our skulls but are otherwise i

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 ef