Shelley Paul and Jill Gough are educators, and they're using doodling to add rocket fuel to all the brains in their classrooms and to their life. KQED's MindShift spoke with them.
Doodling can seem like a frivolous symptom of a scatterbrain. Or maybe it's a scary prospect because you feel like you can't draw. But it's time to let both of those ideas go.
You ready?
A sampling of some of the author's doodles. What do yours look like?
Shelley Paul and Jill Gough, two learning design educators, have taken the call to doodle into their classrooms. Armed with research and some colored pencils, they've come out with some hands-on experience that really illustrates why doodling is the jam.
So here are seven things doodling can do for you.
1. Help you focus.
Digital mediums are creeping into our classes, meetings, and life, and according to a study out of Washington University in St. Louis, they're really hurting our ability to focus and learn:
"Heavy media multi-tasking was related to a reduced ability to ignore distractions and focus on pertinent information — even after accounting for potential differences in academic aptitude, personality and performance on standard creativity and memory tasks."
2. Improve your memory and ability to recall what you've heard and learned.
One study in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology found that participants who were made to doodle during a boring phone call had a 29% improved recall over who that didn't. Learning design director Paul notes:
"Because I was doodling, I could also basically give the lecture afterwards. ... And if I look at the doodle again today for three to four minutes, I can basically remember it all again."
3. Conserve brain energy.
Daydreaming in class, in life, in meetings ... it happens. Daydreaming is actually a great way for humans to work things out, and we shouldn't discount it or try to rid our lives of it. But it kinda exerts your brain and can use up energy. Doodling helps you not daydream when you need to focus, leaving plenty of time to go sit on a bench and look at clouds.
Researcher professor Jackie Andrade, Ph.D., of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth told this to science blog EurekAlert:
"If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream. Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task."
4. Make you actually WANT to pay attention because you're having fun!
You can take a kid to class but you can't make them take notes. It's kind of a chore and, more than that, a bore. Bring doodling in to the mix, and it's a different ballgame. Paul and Gough were impressed with how little convincing it took to get their students to take notes once they introduced doodling into the mix.
5. Create spontaneous study groups in your life.
These educators noticed that, after doodling a lesson, their students would share their drawings with each other. Soon students were helping each other fill in the gaps, as well as going over the work of the lesson. Oops! They formed a study group just by showing off the drawings, and now they're learning more! A very happy accident.
6. Turn your brain into a zip file.
Working memory — aka what's engaged in class, meetings, boring phone calls, and the like — can only take so much on. But because your brain has so many neuronal resources devoted to visuals, doodling is a way to “get your working memory to carry more," according to William Klemm, who gave a talk, "Making Lasting Memories" on memory at the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco.
"It's like a zip file." he said.
7. Give you instant insight into what's important and an ability to reflect even on what you missed.
When a student doodles, they are synthesizing the information, making choices about what's important and downloading the memory into their brain in a new, novel way. Every time! Even stuff you don't put in the doodle gets a place in the download. As Paul explains:
“Even the things you cut get attached to the things you did choose because you can take yourself back to that choice."
Well, I guess doodling isn't a frivolous endeavor at ALL. Turns out, it's one of the easiest ways to give your brain and memory a boost.
So doodle on, you doodlers. You're doin' it right.
Hat tip to KQED for their initial interesting exploration of doodling and memory that inspired me to look into it further!
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