Joe A Kim 🌽⛳️

Your brain doesn't form the thought until you write it down. Nature Reviews Bioengineering published the case for that claim last summer in an editorial titled "Writing is thinking." The cited evidence is a 2024 EEG study at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. 36 students alternated between handwriting and typing the same words. 256-channel sensor array. Cursive on a touchscreen versus keys on a keyboard. Same words both ways. Handwriting produced widespread connectivity across parietal and central brain regions. Typing didn't. The theta and alpha frequency bands the literature ties to memory formation and encoding lit up almost exclusively when the hand was forming the letters. The motor act was producing the cognition. What the editorial extends from that finding is the more uncomfortable claim. Writing a scientific article is the mechanism by which a researcher discovers what their main message actually is. The act of constructing sentences forces the chaotic, non-linear way the mind wanders into a structured, intentional narrative. You sort years of research into a story, and in the sorting, you find out what you believe. Then the line: If writing is thinking, are we not then reading the thoughts of the LLM rather than those of the researchers behind the paper? Nature endorses LLMs for grammar, search, brainstorming, breaking through writer's block. Where the line gets drawn is outsourcing the whole writing process. Because the writing process is the thinking process. Even editing the LLM's draft is harder than writing one from scratch. To restructure someone else's reasoning you have to reconstruct it first, which means doing the cognitive work anyway, with worse leverage and more friction. The time savings on the keyboard turn out to be cognitive savings on the part of the brain you wanted to use. Your first draft was the thinking.

Carl Sagan’s prediction about America, made 31 years ago.

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