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It's true, writing is a great way to capture thought. The brain just can't hold enough things at one time to fully understand many problem spaces, but a Word do

• philh 19y ago
  That's not it. The brain can hold far more than any hard drive. And you don't really understand something that's not in your brain: all the neural links just don't exist on paper. It's the writing that helps. I'm not entirely sure how, but something about putting thoughts into sentences makes the thoughts themselves more coherent. Maybe because it forces you to think them in new ways => more connections => better understanding.
  • phaedrus 19y ago
    Not quite. Long term memory does hold much more than a hard drive. But what the GP is talking about is the limited capacity of short-term memory. When you are thinking about something and fill up your short-term memory, things start dropping out and by definition you can't notice that fact, because all your short-term memory is full! The benefit of an essay is that you can fix the ideas down on paper and move on in your thinking, without having to worry about forgetting where you started from.
    • philh 19y ago
      Granted: if you want to capture a specific train of thought, you'll probably have to write it down. But I was more referring to "to fully understand many problem spaces", for which STM isn't really relevant. Understanding is a matter of how a topic is stored in LTM. Writing it down will improve your understanding of it, but it won't directly increase the amount you can understand.
  • deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]