Doodle do!
My council agenda papers are always covered in doodles. Flowers, hearts, stars, spiders’ webs, faces, animals, cannons (think about it!). Now I hear that it is good for me.
Jackie Andrade, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Plymouth, carried out research demonstrating that doodlers retain more information than those who appear to be concentrating more. Andrade believes that this is because when people are stuck in a boring meeting or listening to a tedious conversation, their minds naturally begin to wander, nut doodling keeps the mind on track..
“A simple task like doodling may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task,” she said. “In everyday life, doodling may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing.”
I’ve always doodled – and whispered in class and council meetings. I’m that irritating person who was picked on by a gloating teacher to ‘Tell me what I just said’ and was always able to do so!
Doodling appears to be more of an aid the more boring the meeting is. Andrade believes this is because when you doodle, you don’t daydream. Daydreaming uses a lot of the brain’s processing power, just like one of those programs that you leave running in the background and slow down your pc. Doodling uses just enough to stop your processor being moved on to another project and keep it on track.
So next time you leave a meeting and can’t remember everything that happened, look for the person who has the greatest coverage of doodles on their papers!
Related posts:
Comments
Leave a Reply:
