Paper rules!
I was just saying I need to get some watercolor paper, and thinking about making art on paper prompted me to look again at this article, "Stronger Brain Activity After Writing on Paper", which I'd found on Michael's blog.
I'd expected it to be about hand-writing. It's more about what surface you write on:
researchers say you remember things better if you write on paper-paper than on e-paper (a tablet or whatever)--because paper is variable.*
I'd just experienced that as a reader: I'd gone looking in a book for a quote I remembered being midway down the right-hand side of the page.
You can't locate things this way online: it was halfway down the screen, where there's a nick in the cover.
Related: that's why I'm painting faces, not just looking at images, to enter them into my memory. Painting them by hand on paper gives them what the article calls "tangible permanence".
Even the frustration of painting helps---maybe especially the frustration?
"Ergh! I cannot get the curl of her lip!"
Maybe not, but now I really, really know the curl of her lip.
I'd read that people (of all races) don't pay close attention to the faces of people of other races. The whole "they all look alike" phenomenon is true, if you don't look closely.
And drawing or painting a face requires you to look closely.
So even if my paintings of Murderbot characters aren't all I'd want them to be (not yet, anyway), they've already done what I wanted--I've got them under my skin.
I like other people's digital art (not that I can tell what it was made on, if I'm looking at it online).
For me, the 3D mess of art making is part of its appeal--even the way the paper buckles when I've gotten it too wet, or tears when I've reworked it too many times.
It's proof: this stuff and I exist here, together.
__________________________
* RE, variable:
"Although volunteers wrote by hand both with pen and paper or stylus and digital tablet, researchers say paper notebooks contain more complex spatial information than digital paper.
Physical paper allows for tangible permanence, irregular strokes, and uneven shape, like folded corners.
In contrast, digital paper is uniform, has no fixed position when scrolling, and disappears when you close the app.
“Our take-home message is to use paper notebooks for information we need to learn or memorize...".
5 comments:
I agree with that last line, I always remember things better if I have written them down. Even if I can't find the notes, I can remember writing them and that brings forth what I wrote, most of the time anyway.
Me, too, RIVER!
--mostly I write online, but if I'm making a List of Things to Do, I do it on paper--and then I don't even need to check the paper (usually)---I remember the act of writing.
When you see students (at least many students) taking notes on a laptop, you see right away the advantages of paper. They’re typing, not listening, not sorting out, not making connections (with say arrows and asterisks).
MICHAEL: I almost never re-read the notes I took in classes--looking back, I'm sure it was the act of writing them that helped me remember them (and therefore not need to read them again).
I can't imagine taking notes on a laptop. I don't think it'd work for me.
P.S. And yet I blog and email all the time... But I DO re-read my blogs and emails... Huh. I never thought about that.
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