The Doodle Revolution: Why You Should Never Stop Doodling in Class

The Doodle Revolution: Why You Should Never Stop Doodling in Class

            Picture this: a classroom full of students who are studiously writing down on their notebooks during class. I bet the teacher would be delighted for such a beautiful sight. However, some students notebooks would instead have small drawings scattered randomly on a page. These are the absent-minded scribblers that teachers hated, and they would always get the passive-aggressive line, “thank you very much for paying attention,” when in fact the underlying statement is exactly the opposite. These people are called doodlers, and they are also closely related to fidgeters: people who constantly spins pens during meetings and classes.

            However, I have never stopped doodling on the margins of my notebook because I’ve always thought that I remembered most of the relevant information after walking out of a classroom. Fortunately, I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Recent studies proved doodlers and fidgeters to be the victors of this long-battled war. So the next time your teacher or your boss caught you scribbling randomly on a piece of paper, tell them that you’re just trying to improve your concentration and memory…and it is backed up by science!

            In a small study published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, Jackie Andrade found out that doodlers actually retain more information than non-doodlers during a lecture. In testing this out, he asked forty participants to help in their research right after these participants came from a boring, unrelated psychological experiment. These participants were asked to go to a quiet room and to listen to an audio tape with a dull tone, making them even bored. In all honesty, dull is such an understatement as one cannot find the right word to describe a pointless voice-message. In this message, exactly eight names and eight places are mentioned, alongside with other supporting information like the weather, a cat, and a museum. Before they started listening, Andrade asked half of these participants to shade some little squares and circles in a piece of paper provided to them, careful not to use the word “doodle” as it may provide subconscious thoughts on the participants. The other half did not do anything aside from listening. While the clip was playing, they were asked to list down the names mentioned in the clip, which means that the doodlers team needed to switch from scribbling to listing down names. This is a rather more tedious job than those of the non-doodlers.

            The results showed the doodlers as the top, writing down a whopping 28% more information than the non-doodlers. Those who doodled wrote down an average of 7.5 words apiece, while the non-doodlers only remembered 5.8 words apiece. In addition to this, participants were also asked to orally recite the names that they can remember from the voice clip. This memory battle was again won by the doodlers, remembering 30% more information than the non-doodlers. The results clearly put light on the beneficial effects of doodling not only in attention but also in memory.

Idle Mind vs. Working Mind

            In an interview by Newsweek’s Dina Fine Maron, Andrade spoke about his interest in doodling and how it was rooted to his interest in daydreaming. When someone is doing a boring work, his mind wanders and he imagines himself going to a trip. Later, he will think of how he is going to book a ticket for the trip, then what to do during the trip. Then his mind will jump into shopping clothes for the trip and thinking of what to eat for dinner. The list goes on. During daydreaming, a lot of mental energy is being taken up while not doing any work, making a person distracted and unproductive. Thus, Andrade thought of a small and simple activity that can help the mind be focused on a boring task at hand while using just enough cognitive energy to avoid a person getting bored and surrender to the world of daydreaming. If a small task can refrain you in finding the task less boring, it can help you maintain your focus.