How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

From Brainstorming to Slip-box-Storming

It makes things worse that we tend to like our first ideas the best and are very reluctant to let go of them, irrespective of their actual relevance (Strack and Mussweiler 1997)

Abstraction is also the key to analyse and compare concepts, to make analogies and to combine ideas; this is especially true when it comes to interdisciplinary work (Goldstone and Wilensky 2008).

The neurobiologist James Zull points out that comparing is our natural form of perception, where our cognitive interpretation is in lockstep with our actual eye movements. Therefore, comparing should be understood quite literally.

Use the Slip-Box as a Creativity Machine

There is a reason why the best scientists are also often very good teachers. For someone like Richard Feynman, everything was about understanding, regardless of whether he was doing research or teaching. His famous Feynman diagrams are primarily tools to make understanding easier and his lectures are famous because they help students to really understand physics.

Confirmation bias is a subtle but major force. As the psychologist Raymond Nickerson puts it: "If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration" (Nickerson 1998, 175).

Real experts, Flyvbjerg writes unambiguously, don't make plans (Flyvbjerg 2001, 19).

Solomon Shereshevsky (Lurija 1987)

Experts rely on embodied experience, which enables them to reach the state of virtuosity.

If you ask academic or nonfiction writers, students or professors how much time they expect it would take them to finish a text, they systematically underestimate the time they need – even when they are asked to estimate the time under the worst-case scenario and if the real conditions turned out to be quite favourable (Kahneman 2013, 245ff). On top of that: half of all doctoral theses will stay unfinished forever (Lonka, 2003, 113).

As Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek put it: "If learning is your goal, cramming is an irrational act"

Now we are faced with a clear choice: We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter.

"The problem with reading academic texts seems to be that we need not the short-term memory, but the long-term memory to develop reference points for distinguishing the important things from the less important, the new information from the mere repeated. But it is of course impossible to remember everything. That would be rote learning. To put it differently: One has to read extremely selectively and extract widespread and connected references. One has to be able to follow recurrences. But how to learn it if guidance is impossible? […] Probably the best method is to take notes – not excerpts, but condensed reformulated accounts of a text. Rewriting what was already written almost automatically trains one to shift the attention towards frames, patterns and categories in the observations, or the conditions/assumptions, which enable certain, but not other descriptions. It makes sense to always ask the question: What is not meant, what is excluded if a certain claim is made? If someone speaks of 'human rights:' What distinction is made? A distinction towards 'non-human rights?' 'Human duties?' Is it a cultural comparison or one with some historic people who didn't have the concept of human rights, but lived okay together anyway? Often, the text does not give an answer or a clear answer to this question. But then one has to resort to one's own imagination." (Luhmann 2000, 154f)

Instead of reviewing a text, you could just as well play a round of ping-pong. In fact, chances are it would help you more because exercise helps to transfer information into long-term memory (cf. Ratey 2008). Plus, exercise reduces stress, which is good, because stress floods our brains with hormones that suppress learning processes (Baram et al. 2008).

Only the actual attempt to retrieve information will clearly show us if we have learned something or not. The mere-exposure effect would fool us here, too: Seeing something we have seen before causes the same emotional reaction as if we had been able to retrieve the information from our memory.

It is proven that readers regard an author and an audience a speaker as more intelligent the more clear and to the point their expressions are (Oppenheimer 2006).

philosopher Immanuel Kant described in his famous text about the Enlightenment: "Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) 'Have the courage to use your own understanding,' is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment." (Kant 1784)

Most often, innovation is not the result of a sudden moment of realization, anyway, but incremental steps toward improvement. Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea. This is why the search for small differences is key. It is such an important skill to see differences between seemingly similar concepts, or connections between seemingly different ideas. This even used to be the meaning of the word "new." "Novus," in Latin, used to mean "different," "unusual," not so much "genuinely new" in the meaning of "unheard" (Luhmann, 2005, 210).

Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fit into my idea of …? How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory? Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complement each other? Isn't this argument similar to that one? Haven't I heard this before? And above all: What does x mean for y? These questions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learning as well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.

Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don't have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices. They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut (cf. Gigerenzer, 2008a, 2008b).

When even highly intelligent students fail in their studies, it's most often because they cease to see the meaning in what they were supposed to learn (cf. Balduf 2009), are unable to make a connection to their personal goals (Glynn et al. 2009) or lack the ability to control their own studies autonomously and on their own terms (Reeve and Jan, 2006; Reeve, 2009).

More people in a brainstorming group usually come up with less good ideas and restrict themselves inadvertently to a narrower range of topics (Mullen, Johnson, and Salas 1991).

The brain more easily remembers information that it encountered recently, which has emotions attached to it and is lively, concrete or specific. Ideally, it rhymes as well (cf. Schacter, 2001; Schacter, Chiao and Mitchell, 2003)

Studies on creativity with engineers show that the ability to find not only creative, but functional and working solutions for technical problems is equal to the ability to make abstractions. The better an engineer is at abstracting from a specific problem, the better and more pragmatic his solutions will be – even for the very problem he abstracted from (Gassmann and Zeschky, 2008, 103).