Unscientifically I always assumed that the pencil-and-paper was not really the important part, just the ritual of memorization that modern people have from however many years of schooling. I assumed the important part was the ritual.

I guess we have a large enough population of people who’ve always taken notes on their computers that a natural experiment could have occurred. But I wonder about the crosstabs—computers can be very distracting so I wonder if people who prefer them to notebooks will also just tend to be more distracted.