You know that feeling when your brain is a runaway train, but your fingers are just… pedestrians? I had this hunch the other day while staring at a blinking cursor. We always talk about "efficiency" like faster is always better. But what if the medium we choose acts like a gear system for our mind? I decided to look up the numbers, and the "impedance mismatch" is real. • Handwriting: ~13 words per minute (wpm). The school zone speed limit. • Typing: ~40 wpm (up to 80+ if you’re in the flow). Highway cruising. • Speaking: ~150 wpm. The autobahn. • Thinking: Estimates vary wildly, but some say our inner voice clocks in at 400 wpm, while abstract thought moves at the speed of a lightning storm—thousands of words per minute. Here is my theory: The friction of the medium filters the quality of the thought. When you handwrite, you are forced to slow down to 1/30th the speed of your brain. That bottleneck is a feature, not a bug. It forces you to compress, synt...