We Need to Write More

Why is our thinking clearer when we write about something than when we just think about it? I wanted to find an answer for this, and now I am convinced that now more than ever we need to pick up the skill of writing. Let me explain.

When you think, your brain runs it in the prefrontal cortex — the planning-and-reasoning hub of your brain. But it only uses your working memory. Think of it as a tiny mental scratchpad that holds only about four things at a time, and they fade in seconds.

The catch is that while you are thinking, the thought and the thinker are the same thing. There is no object outside for you to look at, and you are trying to inspect something that is already dissolving.

But when writing, you plug your slow hands into your fast brain. Your thoughts can come in parallel and tangled all at once, but your hands can only write one word at a time.

That bottleneck is the magic: it forces you to put thoughts in order — pick what comes first, decide what causes what, fill in the "therefore", "but", "because" which your brain happily skipped when you were just thinking.

When you write, you pull the thought out of your head into the real world. Your motor cortex gets involved to drive your hand to write one word at a time, and the second it lands on the page your visual cortex reads it back. You have materialized the thought outside your brain, where you can now see it, judge it and fix it. This feedback loop is simply absent when you are just thinking.

Look, in a world of so much content being thrown at us, all of us chronically online with the circuits of our brains constantly firing, writing is the only thing that will slow us down, pull our scattered thoughts together and keep our cognition alive — which is already being eaten by the social media companies and now AI.

So you, my friend, put down your phone and write something, anything that comes to your mind. And don't use AI to write.