[abeppu]

I don't think I care about what brain activation happens while I'm writing per se -- though I may care about behavioral/performance differences. Do you think more deeply or remember better when taking notes by hand? Are you more likely to catch errors?

Here's one study that looked at unrelated word recall tasks, and didn't see convincing evidence of a difference between handwriting and typing. However, they leave open whether there are differences that arise in more complex learning environments. https://www.jowr.org/jowr/article/view/963/930

I think the higher-level, more realistic experiment I'd like to see someone do is: for a single college-level psychology class, split students into handwriting vs typing groups, and assure them that they'll all be graded on a curve within their assigned group, and see if top-level performance between the two groups differs over a term.

[codr7]

I can't solve complicated problems on a keyboard, I need a pen and paper for deep thinking. It's very rare that I go back and read any of it, means to an end.

[makeitdouble]

Anecdotaly I need to move boxes and arrows around to solve my complicated problems, so pen and paper doesn't cut it either.

I used to do it in sequencing programs like PlantUML, but moved to draw.io -> figjam afterwards, with mouse and keyboard and stylus.

What you're used to and what features you need will heavily influenced the process I guess.

[codr7]

Yeah, I draw a lot of boxes, redraw too :)

I've tried various tools, but nothing comes close to the same freedom.

[makeitdouble]

That's actually the lack of freedom that killed it for me.

Drawing a diagram, it frustrated me to no end to come at the bottom corner of the page and need to either redraw it all on some bigger canvas, or try patch a sheet to extend it, or continue on another page while looking back at the previous one. Same for the max length of a single line.

In figjam or miro the canvas just expands infinitely, it's near A3 size yet I never run out of paper, never run out of color ink, never run out of post'its etc.

It's slower, but I never have to think about the material side of things, which is incredibly freeing to me.

To each their own of course, at this point I think the options are just a lot more balanced than 5 or 10 years ago.

[countingbeans]

The conclusion of that article mentions that it depends on whether your deeper cognitive centers are activated. If writing by hand, the handicap of slower transcription might force the writer to summarize or paraphrase, which uses more brain activity than if you were able to type it verbatim.

That's not to say one is superior to the other. But maybe it means that technique is more important than medium.