Roland Allen
Appearances
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
It doesn't fix it, but what it does, because you are turning an emotion, a feeling into words, you're turning it into something which you sort of have control over. It stops being, for instance, a nameless dread or a massive overwhelming fear. When you turn that big analogue fear in your head into something which is digital and which is concrete and which is measured,
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
by writing it down, that is in fact, in fact, it's a mindful process, because you're identifying your feelings and naming them. And that is what reduces the stress.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
Oh, the glorious variety. I mean, it's fantastic. But since people have started making notebooks, so let's go back to 1300 again, you had huge business ledgers, which were so heavy, sort of pages a foot high and a foot wide, hundreds of pages, which were so heavy, you could barely lift them.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
But you also had tiny little pocket notebooks for going around and making your everyday records, keeping track of your expenses, for instance. And then over time, notebooks get more and more specialised into different ways. So you start to have the date book and then you start to have the sort of dated journal, which gives you a whole page to write about your day.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
And then you go up like legal pads, which I think are the late 19th century. And then you have spiral binding, which is the early 20th century as people invent these new formats, which are practical in their own way. And it's glorious variety. I love it.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
What I love about it is, for instance, musical staves appearing on the page. That made musicians' lives a lot easier very quickly and composers' lives much easier. Putting lines on the page was something that people did anyway if they wanted to write more neatly. You know, they would rule them by hand themselves.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
And then what I love about this is that even sometimes when you see lines on the page today, they haven't necessarily been printed. They've been put on by these sort of arrangements of lots of pens in parallel and the paper is moved underneath them. So they're actually drawn on the page rather than printed. And I like that very much.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
Now, there you're looking at a cultural difference, because over here in Europe, we don't have three ring binders. We have two ring binders. So I can't answer that, I'm afraid. Why that is, I've got no idea. But yeah, three ring binders I find kind of ugly. Two ring binders are slightly more elegant, I suppose.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
Yeah, it's one of those differences. It's like letter paper versus A4 paper, I guess. Why Americans stick with letter and Europeans have moved everything on to A4 and A3 and A naught and so on is again, what is A4 and A3?
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
Oh, Mike, this is wonderful. So this is the metric system as it applies to paper sizes. So there is a good deal of math involved, which I will spare you. But essentially, it means that you're dealing with fractions of a square metre of paper. And so you can bring your paper size into the metric system, which of course is a really handy way of unifying your weights and your volumes and your
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
lengths and widths and everything like that. So you have a sheet of paper which is slightly taller and skinnier than US letter, but which then turns into a really great system because you can fold it and it's in the same proportions as it originally was, just half the size, which you can't do with letter.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
I think you can think about a notebook as being the nearest thing we had to a computer for hundreds of years. And then think of it as a bit of hardware. And then there's different kinds of software which you can put into it. So for instance, double entry bookkeeping, which every accountant or bookkeeper has to learn today.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
And so a lot of your, you know, I ask everyone who's listening now to put up their hand if they've trained in double entry bookkeeping. And that changed the world, double entry bookkeeping.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
Absolutely. Okay, so this is how accountancy works, right? So credits and debits and profit and loss and balance sheets and valuing a company, valuing a business, valuing stock, depreciation, all of these financial concepts entirely depend on writing stuff down, writing your numbers down in a careful format and then collecting them.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
And the only way you could do that for hundreds of years was in a notebook. So everyone who is in any kind of business had to have notebooks, which they kept their financial records in. In 1300, back in Italy, this is when they started doing this. And It's at that point that we see the first companies. So if you've ever worked for a company, they were invented back then in Italy.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
But so also were limited liability partnerships. So was futures trading. So were all kinds of really sophisticated financial instruments. The first merchant banks came from Italy at this point. You had...
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
international businesses which were really much better organized than a lot of businesses I've worked in today and they all used notebooks as their basic technology and that's the case for hundreds of years and then you have sketchbooks and I think sketching is another example of software which you do in this little bit of hardware which is a notebook so
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
People learn to sketch, they learn to scribble and crosshatch their shadows, and they learn to do observational drawing, which is faithful to life. And then you get the artists of the Renaissance. I find that just a mind-blowing idea. And it just carries on and on like that.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
The great scientists, Newton and so on, all made their breakthrough discoveries basically on the pages of their working notebooks or their lab notebooks.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
So Mike, thanks very much for having me. That was a real pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
You tend to understand the material that much better. So that's one of the reasons why writing is better.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
They went into various libraries around the world and never got opened because they're quite difficult to read. People admired the drawings, but
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
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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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
I used to write down song lyrics, for instance, when I was a teenager. And those songs that I wrote down, I can still tell you all of the words to this day. So, I mean, those are just two of the reasons, but also another reason is it probably made you feel better at the time.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
If you were writing down anything about your emotions in particular, how a given situation or an event or a person made you feel, just the act of writing it down would have made you feel measurably better.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
Ah, that's an interesting question. In terms of emotional writing, this is interesting. People were writing about their own emotional states in letters for centuries before they were doing it in diaries. So it's quite normal now. It's considered quite normal to write a diary about how your day went, how you feel about things. Like I said, how you feel about...
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
situations people events they make you feel happy or sad and you write about it and that's a very normal thing to do in the medieval era in the renaissance era it really wasn't but they would very happily write very personal letters to their friends and family telling with all of that same stuff in it how they felt about everything so i think the letter came first in that sense
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
And 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. So the first study was done by a professor called James Pennebaker.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
and he's an American, and he got some of his students to just keep a short journal detailing an emotional trauma that they had experienced in their life, which he didn't have to specify what it was. It was just anything which they considered traumatic. So it might have been a bereavement or an assault or something bad which had happened to them. They wrote it down.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
They didn't do anything with it subsequently. And then for the following semester, visits to the doctor in that cohort of students went down by 50%. They were so much less stressed. They were carrying around so much less bad stuff in their heads that their bodies were literally...
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
just working better so 50 lower visits to the doctor so that's one there's another which i think is equally incredible which is the same process but imagine that you write a an emotional diary like that about two weeks before you have an operation your body will heal
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
measurably faster, something like twice as fast from that physical operation if you've just dumped the bad, unhealthy or unhappy emotions out of your head and onto the page. Whether or not you throw them immediately on the fire or keep them forever or show them to a friend or to a therapist or whoever, it doesn't matter.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
Just getting them out of your head and on the page will help you recover from an operation. I find that mind-blowing.
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How Notebooks Changed Your Life & Are Video Screens Really So Bad?
I think, well, everyone says it must be to do with reducing stress in the body. And I think people are coming to understand that stress just has incredible negative effects on the way your entire body works. But no, I don't understand the mechanics of it. I can't pretend to do.