Books vs Devices and Memory Mechanics

I was recently talking about a study involving various tests, like PISA, where everyone is criticizing the younger generation. The results were predictable because there is a major ongoing discussion now, for example in Germany, about banning social networks, though that is actually about something slightly different.

One of the factors cited for this criticism was that screens actually reduce how well people memorize and reproduce information. For me, this was a bit of a mystery because I’ve been reading from a computer for a very long time and didn't see a huge difference.

However, for instance, I got a Kindle, and I also have a Boox, which is an even more interesting device than the Kindle, though it shares a similar principle with its E Ink screen where you can write and draw—I really like it. Kindle also recently released their Scribe product, which basically has the same functionality.

I noticed that I am more effective on these devices. In practice, I attributed this to the fact that when you read on a computer, you have the "whole" computer—there are so many distractions like social media and notifications. You feel the need to go somewhere else, or you're reading and urgently need to Google something related to what you're reading, and then you get distracted.

I decided that it’s actually because of these processes—having everything available and constantly being distracted. On a device like a Kindle reader or Boox, you get distracted less. And with a paper book, you have nothing but the book itself.

Impact on the Brain and Neuroscience

As it turns out, scientists have researched this and found a real problem. It’s an evolutionary and neuroscience-related issue: our brains were never designed to read "walls of text". Many functions responsible for reading are actually a "repurposing" of existing brain mechanisms.

Consequently, the parts of the brain responsible for reading are actually responsible for spatial orientation and landscape navigation. This explains a lot, because I am dyslexic, but I also have complete "topological cretinism". Without Google Maps, I can get lost even in places I’ve been several times.

It seems these things are connected. The point is that our brain sees text and letters as part of a landscape, activating the same evolutionary mechanisms that helped us remember terrain.

The problem arises because when we read a book, we have a sense of space and coordinates. We can say something is on the left page, the right page, at the bottom, or at the top; we can "hook" onto something to remember it. Plus, the book itself exists in a physical space. When the brain memorizes, it needs something to anchor to. We even have moments where we recall "where" something was—that "where" is the spatial factor in memorization.

When we switch to scrolling, this spatial factor is lost. That is probably the biggest insight here.

Patterns of Device Usage

The second insight is how we use devices, which is also a feature of our brain and memory habits. Mostly, we do things very quickly on devices—scrolling—meaning we don't use them for deep work. When we switch to a device, our brain enters a "surfing" mode. We aren't oriented toward deep processing. This is debatable and requires more research, but it is a major factor.

There is a current wave of pushback, which Ukrainian educators particularly like. In Ukrainian education, nothing was usually happening in this regard, so now everyone is claiming this wasn't just apathy, but a "brilliant plan" by our talented educators who haven't actually read anything about cognitive science since the 70s.

Anyway, there is a rollback happening in Europe; everyone wants to return from digital textbooks to paper because of numerous studies. The Swedes are currently leading this process, as they were among the first to implement total digitalization.

Swedes are returning to offline learning en masse, which is actually quite expensive. It requires a lot of paper, and poor children will once again be carrying heavy bags full of textbooks.

What can we do? Obviously, we won't give up computers, even though I am a "paper person" myself and have many notebooks. I usually start working on paper with concept maps and mind maps.

I’ve always loved what I later learned are called concept maps and graphs. I used to just draw bubbles and arrows, but it turns out there is a serious science behind it. I even studied those graphs later from a mathematical and AI perspective, but we can talk about that another time.

How to Improve Reading on Devices

So, what can be improved?

Visual Anchors: I noticed that when I open a book that is just a "wall of text" with no illustrations or formulas, it’s difficult because there's nothing for the brain to hook onto.

Paragraph Numbering: Many professional student textbooks use paragraph numbering. This serves as a very good locational/topological marker.

Semantic Anchors: Some American textbooks use "semantic anchors" in the margins—short summaries or references of a few words explaining what a paragraph is about. This helps both with navigation and recall.

Background Patterns: Perhaps e-books can be "tuned" by adding a non-distracting background pattern or image that the brain can anchor to. This is an interesting idea that needs more research.

Knowledge Management Systems and Visual Thinking

In 2018, I wrote a long article because I was a fan of various knowledge management systems. My notes always turned into a mess that was impossible to manage.

Since childhood, I’ve had my own "secret system" for taking notes. It turns out that what are now called "canvases" work quite well—tools like Excalidraw or Miro. When you have an infinite canvas in a 2D space, you can arrange notes, link them, and combine them with different materials.

This gives the brain its sense of space back, allowing it to remember where things are located. This is a huge part of "visual thinking". The creator of Excalidraw even wrote a good book on visual thinking; you don't need to be an artist for this, it's just a method of organizing information in a spatial form.

If you can draw or doodle, that’s even better. Research shows that doodling improves information perception during a lecture or while listening to something.

One of the "super hacks" is to return space to information. The simplest thing you can do is disable scrolling in your PDF reader and read page-by-page instead. This is much better and forces your eyes to move.

Then there are canvas-based applications like Excalidraw or the canvas mode in Obsidian. Obsidian also has a good plugin for Excalidraw—I'm a big fan of Obsidian.

There is also the Zettelkasten technology, which used to be entirely offline with physical cards you could touch and rearrange. This also brings in visualization because indexed cards form a graph. This graph is a topological structure where the brain understands where a note is located within that graph.

If we return space, add drawings, and give the brain something to hook onto, then computers and tablets aren't such a bad idea. You can also use color and different fonts to create navigation for the brain.

Color coding is a very powerful technique. Even though I am color blind, I still see colors, I just don't distinguish some of them. When I took notes in college, I used a set of colored pens for formulas and definitions. It took more time but helped a lot.

I also used semi-pictographic or hieroglyphic signs to write down sentences or concepts with a single symbol. Mathematicians love this—every math book requires an excursion into its symbolic system to understand what is written.

So, if we give the brain space, color, and drawings—especially if we create them actively in the process—then computers and tablets are effective.

We have a dilemma: we get new tools that we don't fully know how to use, and we don't fully understand how the brain and cognition work. Instead of learning how to use the tool effectively, we start "lighting torches" and "burning books". That is a bad strategy. The future is already here with AI agents and generative AI, and we need to learn to live with these tools. I have a series of articles and a podcast about this.

To summarize: it’s true that screens can be less effective than paper, but only because screens require a different type of media. If used with the right tools, they can be even more effective than books. And we can also "tune" books by adding more space, color, and "hacks" for the brain to anchor to.