Firstly, a hypothesis: I am highly visual and like working with my hands. This may contribute considerably to any unusual benefit I get out of whiteboards.

So, advantages:

• A whiteboard is mounted on the wall, and visible all of the time. I'm going to be reminded of what's written on it more frequently than if it's on a piece of paper or in a notebook. This is advantageous both for reminder/to-do items and for material I'm trying to learn or think about.

• Instant erasure of errors. Smoosh and it's gone. I find pencil erasers cumbersome and slow, and generally dislike pencil as a writing medium, so on paper my corrected errors become a mess of scribbled obliteration.

• Being able to work with it like an artistic medium. If I'm working with graphs (either in the sense of plotted functions or the edge-and-node variety), I can edit it on the fly without having to resort to messy scribbles or obliterating it and starting again.

• Not accumulating large piles of paper workings of varying (mostly very low) importance. I already have an unavoidably large amount of paper in my life, and reducing the overhead of processing it all is valuable.

The running themes here seem to be "I generate a lot of noisy clutter when I work, both physically and abstractly, and a whiteboard means I generate less".

The physically larger my to-do list is, the more satisfying it feels to cross something off it. Erasing also works much better on whiteboard than with pencil and paper.

Aid in demonstrating things to others, social aesthetic value as a decoration, and personal aesthetic value. Also, erasing is way faster.

being large and in your field of view. Pieces of paper, even explicitly put places to remind you get lost under things or get shuffled away or are easy to ignore.