In essence, you get a double whammy that really sears the goal into your brain. There’s a lot of cognitive processing taking place right there. You have to rethink your mental picture, put it on the paper, place objects, scale them, think about their spatial relations, draw facial expressions, etc. It’s a nice edge to have and, when you write down your goal, you get to access the “generation effect” twice: first, when you generate the goal (create a picture in your mind), and second, when you write it down because you’re essentially reprocessing or regenerating that image.

Neuropsychologists have identified the “generation effect” which basically says individuals demonstrate better memory for material they’ve generated themselves than for material they’ve merely read. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed.

It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to know you will remember something much better if you’re staring at a visual cue (aka reminder) every single day.īut there’s another deeper phenomenon happening: encoding. You could post that paper in your office, on your refrigerator, etc. a piece of paper) that is very easy to access and review at any time. External storage is easy to explain: you’re storing the information contained in your goal in a location (e.g. Writing things down happens on two levels: external storage and encoding.

Write down vs writedown