Manuscript pages of Dickens' "Great Expectations." http://t.co/QlZivN8laG

— Open Culture (@openculture) October 8, 2013

It doesn't say it's handwritten, but I'm pretty sure it is. Brains on Fire contributes a really interesting post on feeling gratitude and expressing it.

Explore reports that Princeton University has digitized Scott Fitzgerald's handwritten draft of The Great Gatsby. Lots of other good stuff is available in the archives. Definitely worth a look.

Fast Company has a nice piece on the importance of taking notes.

As we've discussed before, your mind can only handle so great of a cognitive load--people can only hold so many items in their working memory before they start to fall out. Active listening--that is, attending to the speaker and jotting down the things that catch your attention--lets us invest our working memory in paying attention to the new thing the Facebook founder just said rather than trying to remember that joke he made five minutes ago...

I take lots of notes in paper mole skin notebooks; every week or so I go back with a different color pen and circle the key sentences; I then transfer these ideas to Evernote files on my computer; and finally, I blog/tweet/publish/email out the crispest, most important ideas or quotes.

That's a nice analog-to-digital workflow--one that can help us to attach our experiences to the mental latticework we call knowledge and thus recall info quickly. In this way, we can be productive for the long haul.

Fast Company wades into the handwriting vs digital debate with a helpful survey ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Martin Heidigger to Neil Gaman before concluding with a link to an article from someone who prefers to abandon analog. Patrick Rhone makes the claim that "Forming letters by strokes, as opposed to selecting each by keys, opens regions of the brain involving thinking, language, and memory that are not opened through typing. Writing, real writing, makes you smarter." The keys in the article seem to be freeing yourself from distraction changing your state of awareness. I'm struck by the similarity of thought to John Edward Huth's Losing Our Way in the World—After a year of this endeavor, something dawned on me: the way I viewed the world had palpably changed. The sun looked different, as did the stars. While the ocean didn’t accommodate my “human” need for meaning, a different sense emerged from the wave patterns that conveyed the presence of winds, shoals, coastlines and distant storms—and I'm inclined to agree.