Taking Notes May Impede Your Ability to Remember Stuff — entrepreneur.com

We take notes because we want to remember all kinds of stuff: A niece's birthday, the answer to a test question, what to buy at the grocery store, etc. etc. But a new study published in the journal Memory & Cognition suggests that instead of enhancing our memory, writing stuff down actually makes us more forgetful because we know we can just look at our notes later. In the study, researchers had participants play multiple rounds of Concentration (the game where you need to remember the identity and location of pairs of cards in order to match them). Half of the volunteers were allowed to take notes on the location of the cards before the game started, while the other half were just allowed to study the cards without writing anything down.

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