Pen, Paper, and the PowerPoint Moment

Why thinking still needs friction in the age of instant artifacts

Got new pens last month, plus a few notebooks. Not like I ever stopped 🙂I always have a pen and notebook on me. But somewhere along the way, the collection thinned out. From four or five notebooks and a dozen pens down to one of each, maybe. I noticed it only when I found myself restocking deliberately, back to the absurd quantities that used to feel normal. 😄

I have always been a pen-and-paper person. From grade school through university, and all the years after, I carried one or two notebooks. My brain just works that way. I think by writing things down. I doodle when I’m processing something. I sketch when an idea is still half-formed and needs space to breathe.

Before I had a smartphone, idle time was just idle time. Waiting for the jeepney, waiting for the MRT, waiting for anything really. I was alone with my thoughts, doodling on whatever paper was nearby.

GenAI kind of changed the texture of that. There are more ideas now, and I can act on them faster. But that speed comes with a cost I didn’t really notice at first. The loop from idea to artifact has gotten so short that I stopped sitting with ideas before acting on them. I kept reaching for a tool instead of reaching for the thought itself.

So the notebooks and pens. And now I have a standing appointment at a café, alone, with no agenda except to let my brain do what it is actually built to do.

The PowerPoint moment

This feels familiar in a specific way. Think about what happened when PowerPoint arrived. Before it, presentations ran on overhead projectors; acetates, hand-drawn diagrams, physical objects you had to prepare ahead of time. When PowerPoint came, we went wild. Every animation, every transition, every sound effect. The software could do all of it, so we used all of it.

From The 6 mistakes you’re making with your PowerPoint slides (Credit: Thomas, S.)

Then, slowly, everyone walked it back. Now the best presentations are the sparse ones. The flamboyance became a signal of inexperience.

We are somewhere in the middle of that same arc with GenAI. A lot of us are trigger-happy right now. A question comes in, and the reflex is to prompt something. An idea surfaces, and within minutes, there is a draft, a diagram, an artifact. The speed feels productive, and sometimes it is. But there is a version of thinking that requires friction, and we are systematically removing it.

Spending time with an idea, letting it develop before acting on it, belongs to the process itself; it isn’t inefficiency.

What happens to the brain

There is actual biology here worth paying attention to.

Electrode placements across the brain, highlighting activity within the default mode network. (Credit: Bartoli, et al.)

The brain is generative by design, and that generativity depends on the default mode network (DMN), a set of regions that become more active when you are not focused on a task, daydreaming, or sitting without input. The DMN is associated with imagination, self-referential thought, and the loose associative thinking that produces novel connections. It is, in a meaningful sense, where original ideas come from.

Constant stimulation suppresses it. When the brain is always receiving input, always executing, always responding, the DMN does not get much time to run.

There is also the matter of neuroplasticity. The brain reorganizes itself based on how it is used. Skills and cognitive patterns that get practiced get reinforced. Outsourcing idea generation, even partially, is still outsourcing.

Neuroplasticity in two forms: the brain reshaping itself through learning, and reorganizing connections after disruption. (Credit: Ramasubramanian, L.)

Handwriting engages more of the brain than typing. It activates the motor cortex, the visual cortex, and regions associated with memory encoding. Studies in learning science have shown that students who take notes by hand retain more than those who type, partly because the slower pace forces selection and synthesis rather than transcription. The constraint is the feature.

Writing in a notebook, without autocomplete or suggestion, is a different cognitive mode. Generative rather than responsive. Slower in a way that produces something typing doesn’t.

The diet and the exercise

I have been thinking of this as a two-part problem.

Diet: controlling what goes in. Passive scrolling, reactive conversations, and constant context-switching fragment attention in ways that accumulate. Longer stretches of uninterrupted quiet let the DMN do its job.

Exercise: actually generating. Writing by hand. Sketching. Following a half-formed idea through its own logic without reaching for a tool to finish it. Like any exercise, it requires scheduling, or it doesn’t happen.

I do not go to a café every day, but I make sure I always have a pen and a notebook with me. I also have my iPad and Apple Pencil. The point is not the medium; it is the intent. I want ideas to have room to distill before I do anything with them.

I may produce fewer artifacts per hour this way. That is fine. I am optimizing for something else.

After a while, I’ve noticed my brain adjusting on its own. Too much digital input, and it starts wanting less. It’s the same feeling after the holidays, when you’ve had too much rich food, and your body asks you to stop.