As yet another individual who is hampered by copying down the lecture I'd like to provide some more anecdotal evidence. > There's evidence for note taking, as

As yet another individual who is hampered by copying down the lecture I'd like to provide some more anecdotal evidence. > There's evidence for note taking, as I previously said. The main difference may have been that you had a good grounding in the subject, so taking basic notes would have been a waste of time. I guess we are talking about different kind of lectures. My experience comes from 5 years of mathematical courses with very dense material. Just taking "basic notes" doesn't cut it there, because only an approximation of a definition is mostly worthless. And regarding proofs, if I understand the subject good enough that I can boil down the essential steps of a proof while seeing it for the first time then I don't really need to take notes at all. So I'm actually always forced to copy everything from the blackboard (if there are no official lecture notes). And in these situations my brain is blocked with drawing characters instead of processing what is actually happening behind those characters. Yet, I do have friends that copy everything down, even if there are official lecture notes, because according to them it helps them processing the content. Whether a classification in auditory, etc. types is reasonable or not I don't know, but from this experience alone I find it obvious that people learn in different ways.