Thinking with Paper (Repost)
I am a published author.
When I realized that would be the case back in September, my heart leapt a little. Since I wrote my first short story as a young boy, I’ve wanted to see my words in a book.
Last week, an essay of mine landed as a contribution in The Future of Text Vol. II alongside luminaries like Alan Kay, Barbara Tversky, Ted Nelson, and a host of others. I give great thanks to Frode Hegland and everyone involved for the opportunity.
If you want to support the cause, the e-book is currently available on Amazon, or you can read the free PDF here.
The essay is some blend of a love letter to how I think, a dream of more accessible and computational paper, an exploration of what those advances might bring, and a call to reflect on your own thought techniques. Naturally, I wrote it first on paper.
One on hand, it’s merely an essay. But on the other, it’s a real contribution to the world. A monumental smile rests on my face. This work is fully me.
Frode’s foreword speaks to the importance of love in our communication and interaction. Wonderful.
I hope you can feel the love in this piece.
-Bren
Thinking with Paper
The moment you are inspired to work out an idea, what do you do?
Do you go somewhere? Do you pull out your phone and start typing? The initial wave of thought floods our brains with excitement; do you record it?
I go to my notebook. I have to write.
A small, lined notebook holds these words. This essay, along with other blue sky ideas, began there. My notebook is the safe space to scratch out the unknown, the home of deliberate and undistracted thought.
Writing on paper forces me to slow down. The paper turns me into a craftsman. Many studies suggest similar benefits – the brain’s language, memory, and thinking functions activate when writing by hand [1, 2, 3]. Away from the distraction of computers, I am fully present, focused on choosing the exact words that reflect my thoughts. In this way, the paper notebook affords full focus – a feeling hard to come by on a machine that provides near infinite access.
Of course, not everyone is beholden to the same focusing challenges. Many of you use different mediums to think. The computer works just fine for some of us. That’s quite the point! We have all lived different experiences, and we all think in our own ways.
Our thinking changes depending on the surface. My etches in a dot grid notebook are full of everyday observations. My words in a hardcover mini lined notebook form short stories. Elaborate drawings and their descriptions fill my sketchbook. My Roam graph is purely typed, with past references transcluded and queries interspersed. There, I ask myself questions, talk to my future self, and generate new thoughts. Each has different constraints, which offer different lenses in which to think.
The goal of tools is to enable us to achieve something we could not without it. In our hand, the hammer pounds nails that build structure. The pencil jots notes that build ideas. The ideal tool augments us in a way that enables us to be greater than we were before. Paper and pencil have given us this gift.
But herein lies the issue. Once I realized my notes could link to one another digitally, I had to question my approach. My paper notebooks can’t talk to each other. They can’t even reopen themselves. So, I moved to the computer. Thinking and writing in my graph was the best way to build onto my thoughts.
I imagine many of us have fallen into this approach. Surely, computers enable us to accumulate knowledge. Yet, I was missing the biggest point – improving my ability to think. Our best thinking is done in a multitude of ways, not only at the computer. For me, it's on paper.
And yet, to get my paper thoughts to my digital graph, the friction is immense. Digital tools like OCR work at times, but rarely on my written notes without extensive training. We all write differently than we type. The medium is different.
So, we stand at an impasse. Either we take time to deal with the friction or we accept that our words stay in the notebook. Much of the time we default to the latter, and poof! Notebooks stack up on the bookshelf, our grand thoughts locked away as if they never existed.
Considering the visceral feeling of losing notes, it’s a bit mad that many of us have willingly accepted that we probably won’t see many of our handwritten notes again. This isn’t quite Hemingway losing a suitcase of his life’s work, but still, how gutting a feeling! Are we satisfied with that reality?
My guess is no. Enough people stand to benefit from a better solution. What might happen if paper could communicate with computers?
Allow yourself to dream for a moment.
On the simple end, fleeting tasks on post-its might sync to our digital TODOs. Our sketches might intertwine with related digital notes, helping us link thoughts across time and space. On the grander end, might we have more access to collective insights? The prolific notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin are chock full of generative text. I am certain we stand to benefit from interweaving notes from other brilliant minds. And on…
Surely, downsides would arise, as well. An influx of volume equates to clutter, resulting in greater need for improved organization and retrieval systems. New disputes may occur. I can easily imagine a bitter legal bout to determine business ownership over a napkin sketch. We must always consider the downstream effects of our advances.
Attempts to solve this problem have been made here already. Richard Saul Wurman's thought about paper that updates when held near a power source offers an idea [4]. As do commercial efforts. Anoto, E-Paper, Livescribe, Moleskine's Smart Writing System, Remarkable, and others have taken aim at modernizing paper. Today’s efforts show promise. Perhaps they will come to fruition with a larger audience.
The dreamer in me imagines a more accessible future, though. Perhaps a ubiquitous retinal scan allows wink to capture. Or all future paper dipped in an electronic coating pushes text to our personal cloud. Maybe OCR just becomes really good and can be tailored to anyone. Whatever the solution, we must prioritize its accessibility.
Because thinking is important. Thinking is how we solve the problems we create on this planet. We live in a world where billions of people can access information from anywhere, yet we create more information waste than ever before. How can we put our thoughts to better use?
As a child of the 20th century, I was born prior to the age of digital natives, so paper feels like home to me. Yet, generations from now, will paper still be prominently used? Musing on human reactions to technology, Douglas Adams claimed, "Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things" [5]. Indeed, maybe an emerging technology may render paper less useful. But today, tracking back to the emergence of cheap paper in the late 1800s CE, paper is ubiquitous with thought.
We live in an incredibly fortunate time to ask these questions. Computing and thinking pioneers like Engelbart, Licklider and Nelson laid the groundwork more than a half century ago, and a growing collective has readopted their hopes of augmenting human intellect today. If our aim is better thinking, we must integrate different mediums of thought.
In a world that prioritizes convenience, it's only sensible we try to eliminate all waste, especially with our most valuable resource – time. We create things to make life easier. Why not make it possible to interact with paper?
Thinking back to those moments of inspiration – do you still have the thoughts somewhere?
Perhaps you do, but many of us sit on countless stacks of inaccessible notes. Even if I still have the notebook, the thoughts are incomplete, disorganized, or forgotten. Rich detail lives in those initial thoughts, but most of us have lost that context. Even if you disagree with Ginsberg's "first thought, best thought" mindset, the origins of our ideas are ripe to revisit. In that excitement, our body shouts, "This is important!" We should listen.
Whether you prefer to think in analog or digital, the future of text will enable deep thought for each of us. When we want to write on paper, we won’t have to worry about misplacing the page. The future of text will allow us to think with paper, with a machine behind it.
References
[1] van der Meer, A. L., & van der Weel, F. R. (2017). Only Three Fingers Write, but the Whole Brain Works: A High-Density EEG Study Showing Advantages of Drawing Over Typing for Learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00706
[2] Wollscheid, S., Sjaastad, J., & Tømte, C. (2016). The impact of digital devices vs. pen(cil) and paper on primary school students' writing skills – a research review. Computers & Education, 95, 19–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.12.001
[3] Planton, S., Jucla, M., Roux, F.-E., & Démonet, J.-F. (2013). The “handwriting brain”: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of motor versus orthographic processes. Cortex, 49(10), 2772–2787. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2013.05.011
[4] Wurman, R. S. (2020). Dot. In F. A. Hegland (Ed.), The Future of Text (Vol. 1, pp. 340–341). essay, Future Text Publishing.
[5] Adams, D. (2005). The Salmon of Doubt. Perfection Learning.
Special thanks to Donna Figenshu, Evan Meyer, Michael Cochran, and Mike DeCero for providing feedback on early versions of this. I could not do this without any of you.