What Twenty-Eight Notes Show

Perpetual calendar, possibly 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0).

A note is written in the kitchen at 8:40: they will say no. It has the words, the time and the place. Twenty-eight of these can show something that memory does not. KTT counts each note as the trace of a thought, noticed or not, even when the thought arrived as a feeling and needed words afterward. Research on self-report suggests why notes made in the moment differ from a later summary. The studies read for this article were about emotion reports, not thought notes, and did not test whether a thought comes first.

One note

The first note holds one moment. It is what researchers call a momentary report. According to Michael Robinson and Gerald Clore’s 2002 accessibility model, momentary feelings are reported from experiential knowledge tied to a time and a place. The note keeps that detail, and a later memory does not.

One week

After seven days, the notes can be read together, and the word for what is on the page is evidence. The same model says what happens without notes. As time passes, episodic detail becomes harder to retrieve, and what a person believes about themselves fills in. Retrospective reports then follow beliefs more than events. In tests of memory for painful procedures, retrospective judgments leaned on the worst moment and the last moment, a pattern called the peak-end rule. For whole days, later work found that evaluations leaned more on averages. Memory has its own rules, and they differ by length of time.

Four weeks

At twenty-eight notes, repeats can show up. The psychologist Eric Klinger proposed that spontaneous thought often follows current concerns, goals a person has committed to and not yet reached or dropped. A month of notes is a way to see whether the same line keeps returning, and where. This is KTT’s use of the idea, not a tested method. The studies read here did not test thought notes, or whether keeping notes changes anything.

What is not known

Whether notes capture thoughts accurately is not known. A note is written after the thought, in words that may differ from the thought’s own.

Whether keeping notes changes the thoughts is open. None of the studies read here tested that.

Whether twenty-eight is a useful number is also open. It comes from KTT’s own practice, not from a study.