[omwow]

I've had the exact same thought. This is anecdotal, but I found that writing stuff out by hand indeed helps me tremendously to absorb the material, mainly by creating a more focused state of mind than I'm in otherwise. It's almost as if the hand is guiding the mind, and facilitating the right mental state. That said, I've been getting better at achieving that level of focus without writing things down by hand, and find that actually verbally recapping what I wrote to myself helps me internalize what I read even better, although it's more hit and miss—when my monkey mind acts up, I go back to writing things out by hand. I'd be very curious to see someone doing a more rigorous experiment across a larger group of people and see what conclusion they arrive at.