Reflections on “Writing by hand is good for your brain”
I recently read Neal Stephenson's essay about why writing by hand is good for your brain.
It made me realize that I have barely written anything by hand in more than a decade. I'm in no way exaggerating when I say that I have the same Moleskine notebook from 10+ years ago sitting on my desk, less than half-filled.
After reading the article, I made it a point to write something a few times a week—what I wanted to accomplish, problems I was thinking through, things I needed to remember.
What I found was that I wasn't merely recording my thoughts more slowly. I seemed to be thinking differently, almost as if I had unlocked another dimension of my intelligence that had been sitting there unused.
Around the same time, I started noticing something similar in my conversations with the upgraded ChatGPT Voice released in early July. When I type, I tend to compress and make my thoughts precise (as I'm doing now!). When I speak, the opposite happens. My precision goes way down. I ramble, backtrack, and remember another thing halfway through a sentence. But my recall goes way up. I get more out of my brain than I would have otherwise.
Speaking out loud to an AI feels like accessing parts of my brain that were previously used only during in-person conversations, but never during solo thinking.
Both experiences made me realize that interfaces like paper and voice may be part of the machinery that helps us think. Moving a pen on paper to form words or speaking and reacting to another voice changes the loop in which perception, action, and reflection take place.
That made me wonder whether the same idea applies to AI. As I went down this rabbit hole, I found some early research suggesting that it might. There are papers on models reasoning better when given a visual scratchpad or allowed to generate diagrams as they think through a problem. However, other research shows that simply forcing a model to draw can make its reasoning worse when the representation it creates is bad.
At least in some settings, expressing something in a form other than words can improve the cognitive loop:
think → express → perceive → think again
The interesting capability might be learning which representation is useful for which problem. Humans seem to do this almost all the time. I prefer typing for most kinds of thought. I discover other kinds by talking. I apparently discover yet another kind when I put a pen in my hand and scribble on a blank piece of paper.
It seems likely that intelligence isn't entirely something that happens internally and then gets expressed through an interface. The interface participates in creating the thought itself. Chain-of-thought reasoning also feels like a version of this.
To conclude, this is a question I find fascinating: Could an AI choose its own medium of thought? When should it write? When should it draw? When should it speak? When should it write code? Or, in the case of robots, when should it manipulate something in an environment, observe the result, and reconsider?