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 probl

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.