[bayesian_horse]

Maybe you would do even better just imagining writing it down on paper or actively building mental representations.

But if it works well enough, why not? The act of writing notes may involve mental processing or not. If it's just a matter of concentration and focus, there might be better remedies.

[Hermitian909]

Imagining writing it down would keep me from actively building mental representations in most situations :)

The writing is semi-automatic and does not merely involve verbatim quotes from others. If today I were to attend a lecture or talk and something the speaker said prompted some visual insight I would immediately draw it as part of my note-taking process. The whole reason I began taking such copious notes, in fact, was the realization that if I didn't write these things down I often needed to have an insight two to three times for it to become a permanent part of my mental model of a problem space, rather than the once.

[Izkata]

No matter how good your mental discipline, it won't be as consistently good as writing down the notes. This is just another variation of point-and-call [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling