I used to carry a notepad, pen and iPhone in my shirt pocket until I traded my iPhone 7 in for a slightly larger iPhone 14, which is not THAT much larger but larger enough to crowd out the notepad.
At Sunday morning brunch, I grabbed a napkin to make a note and Mary asked, “Why don’t you use the Notes app on your iPhone?”
“I forget that app is there. I never look back at my notes,” I replied, and to demonstrate I opened the Notes app for the first time in a very long time.
I read:
World without cats
Death on the Shore Michael P
Y3
I had no idea what those notes meant. Piecing them together with the help of DuckDuckGo, I must assume that at some point someone must have recommended the books World Without Cats by Bonham Richards and Death Along the Shore (sic) by Michael Pritzkow, but I have no memory of it.
And Y3? What could that have been? Adidas has a line of clothes and shoes called Y-3, but I would not have written a note to myself about a brand of clothes. That’s just not me.
In contrast, over the years I took hundreds if not thousands of notes to myself on my paper pad that I stuck in a pile under a paperweight, and in most cases I could still tell you what I was thinking when I wrote them.
I think there’s something about the tactile act of writing with pen on paper that helps etch the memory into the brain. Why this does not work when touching a finger to a screen to type the same note, I can’t say.
