If I say "people have two legs", someone is bound to reply "My friend Bob has only one leg."

Same here, apparently it’s a major ADHD thing. I can take notes or I can pay attention and try to understand, but I can’t do both, you have to pick one (a calculus teacher in high school was very insistent that constant note taking for her rapid-fire example-heaving lectures was required, so… yeah I didn’t have a clue WTF we’d even been covering after each of those classes, though I’d have lots of notes!)

Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22

Are you sure this is a permanent fact about you and not something that would change if it became habitual?

I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.

Do you acknowledge you're a minority?

I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.

But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.

I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.

point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.