The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper: A New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year

Philosophers, neuroscientists, educators and psychologists like to disagree in many different aspects on how the brain works. But they no longer disagree when it comes to the need for external scaffolding. Almost all agree nowadays that real thinking requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of writing.

Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generate ideas, because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway.

That’s the essence of all this. I write in a notebook every day. But I almost never go back and look at what I wrote. Writing in a notebook is about transferring things from the world to your brain, not to your notebook. Your notebook is a lens for looking at the world, not a box to keep it in.