The Power of the
Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory
Research Shows That Doodling Helps People Stay
Focused, Grasp New Concepts and Retain Information
By Sue Shellenbarger in the Wall Street Journal
Long dismissed as a
waste of time, doodling is getting new respect.
Recent research in
neuroscience, psychology and design shows that doodling can help people stay
focused, grasp new concepts and retain information. A blank page also can serve
as an extended playing field for the brain, allowing people to revise and
improve on creative thoughts and ideas.
Doodles are
spontaneous marks that can take many forms, from abstract patterns or designs
to images of objects, landscapes, people or faces. Some people doodle by
retracing words or letters, but doodling doesn't include note-taking.
"It's a thinking
tool," says Sunni Brown, an Austin, Texas, author of a new book, "The
Doodle Revolution." It can affect how we process information and solve
problems, she says.
Doodling in meetings
and lectures helps ease tension for Samantha Wilson, a high-school teacher and
graduate student from Southborough, Mass. Drawing squiggly patterns that are
"very vegetal, scrolling and organic," with shaded blocks and spirals
in red and blue pen on paper, also allays boredom, she says.
"It looks like
I'm spacing out when I'm doodling, but I'm actually making my thoughts come
together, solidifying my own ideas," Ms. Wilson says. Doodling recently
helped her come up with a theme for a paper in a graduate-school course she is
taking, she says.
Scientists in the past
thought doodles provided a window into the doodler's psyche, but the idea isn't
supported by research, says a 2011 study in The Lancet, a medical journal.
Some researchers
suspect doodling may help the brain remain active by engaging its "default
networks"—regions that maintain a baseline of activity in the cerebral
cortex when outside stimuli are absent, the Lancet study says. People who were
encouraged to doodle while listening to a list of people's names being read
were able to remember 29% more of the information on a surprise quiz later,
according to a 2009 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Jesse Prinz draws
people's heads to help himself pay attention during lectures and speeches at
conferences he attends. The head usually has "something happening to it—an
animal on top of it or something coming out of it," says Dr. Prinz, a distinguished
professor of philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
When Dr. Prinz returns
to the doodle later, "I can reconstruct a lot of what I heard" in the
lecture. He compares it to a post card: A traveler may forget specifics about a
trip, but "if you look at that post card, a lot of things that aren't
depicted in it come back to you," he says.
Ms. Brown, the author,
says doodling provides an alternate route to learning for some people. Her
professional work includes training company managers to translate ideas and
concepts into sketches and drawings in order to spark ideas and improve
communication.
Michiko Maruyama, a
medical-school student, says she writes down key words during class lectures
and later draws "daily doodles" that bring together what she learned.
Ms. Maruyama, who attends the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, says
she fills gaps in her understanding while she draws images of gastric secretions,
hernias and other subjects of study.
"It's not until I
doodle that I think about how everything comes together. I find out what I know
and what I don't know," she says. When she stopped doodling for a week,
her grades went down.
The appearance of a
doodle can stimulate ideas for improvement, according to a 2014 study by
Gabriela Goldschmidt, a professor emeritus of architecture at the Technion-Israel
Institute of Technology in Haifa and a researcher on learning techniques of
design. A doodle can spark a "dialog between the mind and the hand holding
a pencil and the eyes that perceive the marks on paper," the study says.
The study discussed an
architecture student who became stalled in his efforts to design a new
kindergarten and started a habitual doodle he found pleasurable—writing his
signature over and over.
The student soon began
to see between the letters of the doodle the outline of a layout for the
kindergarten's three activity spaces. He drew progressively larger versions
that eventually became an architectural sketch, the study says.
A doodle also can
express emotions too complex for words. Ten doodlers in a four-week study were
equipped by researchers to share their sketches on social media, using digital
pens and Bluetooth-equipped phones.
Many of the
participants' doodles expressed complex emotions they wouldn't have shared via
written posts or texts, according to the study, presented in 2011 at a
Stockholm conference on human-computer interaction.
One 37-year-old
teacher, the father of a newborn baby, drew a frazzled-looking brain to convey
a feeling of being overwhelmed. A 27-year-old graduate student drew a towering
obelisk looming over a childlike figure, to convey the pressure she felt over a
deadline for a paper, according to the study, which was led by Lisa Cowan, who
earned a Ph.D. in computer science at University of California San Diego and
now works as a software developer in Mammoth Lakes, Calif.
The opportunity to
doodle "changed the way people expressed their feelings," says Nadir
Weibel, a research assistant professor in computer science at UCSD and a
co-author of the study. "Their pictures communicated more than just a text
or a regular photo. They were more personal, more intimate."
Doodling doesn't work
for all tasks. People who were asked to view and remember a collection of
images struggled at the task if they were asked to doodle at the same time,
according to a 2012 study published by the University of British Columbia. The
likely reason: Doodlers' visual-processing ability was split between two visual
tasks, says the study's author, Elaine Chan, a former psychology student at the
university who is now a researcher at a Vancouver children's hospital.
Put another way, when
doodling and another task use the same cognitive pathways, "you have a
traffic jam," says Ms. Brown.
The entire article,
with images (doodles) can be found at: http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-power-of-the-doodle-improve-your-focus-and-memory-1406675744?mod=trending_now_5
No comments:
Post a Comment