Thanks to Michael Faris (who got it from Clay Spinuzzi), I came across this lifehack.org article on the link between writing and remembering:

When we take notes, though, something happens. As we’re writing, we create spatial relations between the various bits of information we are recording. Spatial tasks are handled by another part of the brain, and the act of linking the verbal information with the spatial relationship seems to filter out the less relevant or important information.

So here’s what happens: in one psychological test involving students watching a lecture on psychology (psychologists who work in academia have a virtually unlimited supply of research subjects — their students!) students who did not take notes remembered the same number of points as the students who did take notes. That is, the mere act of taking notes did not increase the amount of stuff they memorized. Both groups of students remembered around 40% of the information covered in the lecture (which as a professor makes me sad, but I guess that’s the way humans work). But the students who had taken notes remembered a higher proportion of key facts, while those who did not take notes remembered a more or less random assortment of points covered in the lecture. [Read whole post.]

Posted mostly here as a bookmark, I could run with this passage (and article) in a number of ways. Of course, both Mary Carruthers and Jocelyn Penny Small connect the development of the classical artificial memory to literacy/writing (a metaphor taken from classical texts), and in bringing that up, I have to mention point out that the places and images mnemonic (and its various medieval adaptations) is visio-spatial in nature. (( Mary Carruthers classifies all of these systems, both classical and medieval as locational memory. )) We can then add to this a discussion of medieval poetry such as like Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s House of Fame, and the Old English “Dream of the Rood” (to name my three standard examples) which various scholars (Francis Yates, Mary Carruthers, and Beryl Rowland for example) have connected to the places and images mnemonic. (( Carruthers’ The Craft of Memory is the most comprehensive source for understanding how memoria is used as a compositional tool, although her essay “The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.” [New Literary History 24 (1992-1993): 881-904] will work fine if you’re pressed for time. )) In those poems, the visio-spatial nature of locational memory is combined with the mnemonic power of story, which is discussed in the lifehacker.org’s sixth Sticky Ideas Workshop: Stories (( For those wanting something a bit more scholarly, I can recommend Kevin M. Bradt, SJ’s Story as a Way of Knowing, John Niles’ Homo Narrans, and Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind. ))