Roland Allen
speaker
51 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Roland Allen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There is a lot of research on this. I think there is something like more than 1,200 studies, and they all confirm the same basic result, which is writing stuff down about your emotions makes you physically healthier.
Well, I guess if I've had one big idea in my life, it's to suddenly notice notebooks. And once you start noticing them, you notice them absolutely everywhere.
And I suppose just thinking about the role, the different parts they play in all of our lives and the parts they've played in our lives through history and the changes that they've made to our lives, I guess that's what got me really into them.
The first something like a notebook that we know of is from about the year 1300 BC. So that's coming up for 3,500 years old. They found it in a shipwreck off the south coast of Turkey. It's called the Uluburun shipwreck. And it's pretty well preserved considering how old it is. You can see it in a museum in Bodrum in Turkey. And that was very much a working notebook.
It probably belonged to a merchant or some kind of sailor, ship's captain, something like that, and was probably to do with business. And the first notebooks nearly always are to do with business.
It has to be paper. That's the only real definition I have. So an electronic thing doesn't really count as a notebook for me, although you can do lots of the same things. Historically, parchment and papyrus things and wax tablets aren't quite the same. You can't do as much with them as you can do with paper. So I think notebooks can be really huge.
I think they can be like massive business ledgers. I think they can be absolutely tiny, like the smallest little date books. But if they're made of paper and they've got blank pages, then I call them a notebook.
I think there is actually a substantial difference. Yeah, I think the way we use paper notebooks tends to be much more casual, much more immediate. And they make a permanent record. You make a thing, you make an object when you fill up a notebook. So you start off with these beautiful blank pages and a lot of people are afraid of the blank page.
But when you filled up a notebook with your own thoughts and even with your own shopping lists or with something as trivial as that or things to do lists, it becomes this unique kind of object which crystallizes a little bit of your personality or your soul in it.
Yeah, there's a ton of research about it. Most of it is to do with education. So obviously, when you're dealing with students in a lecture theatre, it's really important to know what the best way to get knowledge into their heads and then get it out of their heads as well, get them producing stuff.
And they've done a lot of research on this everywhere across the US, Canada, Japan in particular for some reason. And they've found that in a studying context, writing, handwriting with a pen or pencil in a notebook is nearly always much, much better than typing. If you write stuff down, you tend to process it in a more involved way. You tend to paraphrase.
You tend to understand the material that much better. So that's one of the reasons why writing is better.
Well, Leonardo da Vinci is clearly the superstar. And in all of my research for the book, I never found anyone who did better notebooks than him. But I guess a really peculiar thing about Leonardo's notebooks is that they turned out to be very private. After he died, no one looked at them, really.
They went into various libraries around the world and never got opened because they're quite difficult to read. People admired the drawings, but
actual notes he made which are in many ways much more incredible than the drawings he did were completely ignored so fantastic as they were they had a limited impact on the world whereas if you look at someone like charles darwin's notebooks completely the opposite they're horrible to look at they're absolutely scrappy but it was those notes which directly led to
on the origin of species by natural selection and so the theory of evolution which has completely changed the way we think about the world and this sprang out of 14 or 15 tiny tiny notebooks which together would fit for instance in a shoebox without any trouble so although they're very unspectacular looking very scrappy no punctuation these possibly are the ones which have had the greatest impact on the way we think
In terms of a paper notebook, as we would think of it and recognise it with covers and paper pages, you're looking, I think, at Baghdad around the year 800. That seems to be the general consensus, because bookbinding, making paper into the shape that we recognise it today, that's a Western thing.
Paper is an Eastern thing, came originally from China, and they seem to meet in Baghdad around the year 800, and therefore that's where the first notebooks are going to have been. Very, very few of them, if any, from that era seem to have survived. When they do start surviving in huge numbers for the first time, it is in Italy around 500 years later, and it is particularly in Florence.
And that was just a notebook-obsessed culture. And we have a lot of different kinds of notebooks from there. So that's really an important stage in the story, I think.
I would find it really interesting. And if you do have your notebooks from that time, then that's a sort of window back into the person that you were. You sort of get to meet them again, looking backwards. If you were writing anything down for an educational reason or because you wanted to remember it, then writing stuff down in a notebook is really about the best way to remember it.
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