I'm convinced that it's impossible to properly learn most complex subjects from a lecture if you take notes on a laptop or (especially) don't take notes at all.

I'm convinced that it's impossible to properly learn most complex subjects from a lecture if you take notes on a laptop or (especially) don't take notes at all. What little knowledge managed to stick to my brain in school, I owe to taking copious handwritten notes, and then looking at them a few times later. You are _forced_ to understand, since you can't possibly write down everything, and the ease of capturing formulas and graphs is not to be underestimated either. Speaking of which, it makes me wonder if the current aversion to taking handwritten notes people seem to have biases academic achievement towards some subjects where notes are generally not very useful (e.g. programming) and away from fundamental, formula- and graph-heavy stuff, e.g. physics and math, which you can hardly properly learn without notes at all.