It turns out that back in the day, it was short sighted to bust seemingly unfocused students for doodling during class lectures. As a number of credible researchers have since proven, drawing on one’s class notes significantly increases one’s ability to retrieve information at a later point in time.
Texas A&M University Professor of Neuroscience and Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, William Klemm likens doodling to creating a zip file in your mind, compressing information for storage and later retrieval. From KQED/MindShift’s article Making Learning Visible: Doodling Helps Memories Stick, Klemm says doodling is one way “to get your working memory to carry more.”
Now that doodlers are redeemed in academics, we are enjoying a resurgence, as well as a digital renaissance in doodling venues and resources. These three sites are enjoyable in different ways.
- Doodler’s Anonymous is a thorough resource for people loving to draw and share with others in the art community. It includes showcases of site members, endless possibilities of inspiration, and interesting challenges, including the current challenge “to illustrate the spaces in your home that you hold near and dear to your heart.” For people like me, that would mean drawing my drawings. See submission guidelines for more details!
- Whether using a touchscreen or a track pad, Google’s Quickdraw is fun to turn into a taking-turns game with children, or anyone comfortable laughing at themselves. Google has set up an artificial intelligence program to identify people’s simple drawings in 345 different categories, such as shoe, bench, canoe, etc. Your task is to draw something from a given category in less then 20 seconds, while the AI program verbally guesses what your drawing. It’s like Pictionary, with the extra added benefit of providing a “unique data set that can help developers train new neural networks, help researchers see patterns in how people around the world draw, and help artists create things we haven’t begun to think of.” With the data being open sourced, anyone is free to make use of the information.
- Sketchpad 5.1 is one of many excellent and free digital drawing websites available to doodlers willing to migrate from their sketch pads to a different creative venue. One of many tools, Sketchpad’s mirror brush allows an artist to draw complex and beautiful mandalas, which can oftentimes be therapeutic after a long work week. Sketchpad offers over 800 fonts, a spirograph option, vector fill, and other delightful shortcuts for the visually curious and creative.
I have always encouraged my students to draw, telling them it’s one of the best ways you can get images in your mind out into the world for others to see, but it’s actually also one of the best ways to get what’s out in the world into your mind. The Wall Street Journal’s 2014 article “The Power of the Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory” states that “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.” In an age of ever increasing demands on one’s attention and short term memory, we might need to explore the impact of a quick doodle on where we left our forever missing keys.
