Don’t be fooled by a doodler…

Doodling is a powerful visual tool at our disposal. Use it to enhance your learning capacity.

I have always (seems like eternity as it is hard to recall, when I picked up this expression form…) compartmentalised, mind mapped, used flow or box diagrams to better explain the contents to myself and sometimes to others too, do effective note taking, committed things to memory as well as brainstormed ideas using visual form. Mostly this peculiar habit has been restricted to work related endeavours, but recently this gratifying habit also entered into my personal space. I began supporting my travel experiences, blog articles, and day-to-day activities through texts and visual aides i.e. simple drawings, info graphs, charts and labels etc.

See here! In less than a month’s time (and I am not boasting…), I have sketched landscapes, architectures, blog banner designs, and even the home floor layouts to remember and understand things.

I began wondering why I am doing this? I turned to Google (the one stop passageway for all our inquisitiveness) with the hope to unravel the deep-seated mystery behind my drawing syndrome. And the word, “DOODLE”, greeted me with a perky SMILE J. This word gave an immediate meaning to all the drawings/sketching that I have been doing (just not recently but over so many years).  I was bombarded with flood of information (researches, articles, and videos) that spoke about Doodling and its impact on learning levels both for adult and children alike. Like a curious child, I carefully read & skimmed through sea of information to build my own database that would then be used in developing the premise for, “Why Doodling Works”.

Often time, we see both adult and children alike engaged in an unconscious act of drawing/sketching and scribbling. The more pronounced cases of this engagement form are seen (or can be found) inside the meeting rooms or classrooms. To an ordinary individual (or let’s say an unaware being…), it might appear that the person is just trying to pass away the time or uninterested in the proceedings. On a contrary, this person was trying to focus by blending art and text format during the listening/discussing/or seeing act. It was a way for the person to process and filter out the most critical part of the information heard or seen. Indeed this person was Doodling (he/she had engaged the mind in a clever form of information processing and organising).

So, what exactly is this doodling thing (the latest buzz word in the circuit)?

Simply put, “Doodling is a visual tool that boosts ones ability to focus upon things. In other words, “Doodling is an impromptu creative outburst thereby making one remain active and agile”.

Sunni brown, a renowned doodle activist who also owns a design firm focused towards visual literacy and author of “The Doodle Revolution”, presented a power packed definition of doodling during her appearance at TED 2011 conference in long Beach, California. She said and I quote, “To doodle is like to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think”. 

Clearly, Doodling is a learning tool in disguised form!

I plunged more into research and thoughts relating to doodling, to further build and elaborate upon the premise of, “Why Doodling Works”.

The connotation, “born doodler”, seems just appropriate…

Let’s transport ourselves back to childhood days and imagine the written learning evidences we all (or most of us displayed) in initial years of our development. Most of us might end up saying that they drew pictures and figures. But did you know that these pictures were not actually drawings but a form of expression?

Consider this, “the young child’s first interaction with his environment, before the development of language, are based almost totally on spatial experiences, particularly through the senses of sight and touch.” It is for this sole reason that even before a child can speak, they can draw pictures. It is part of their process of understanding what’s around them. They draw not just what they see, but how they perceive the world. Look below at this drawing of man by a child aged 4 years and 4 months. (Illustration source: Children Learning Mathematics – Linda Dickson, Margaret Brown & Olwen Gibson)

The drawing or doodle of a child is not necessarily an attempt to represent reality, but rather an attempt to communicate their understanding of it. Look below, how this child used drawing to recall the mermaid story that she/he happened to see a while ago.

 (Excerpt from an acquaintance’s child sketchpad…)

This is no surprise because playing, trial and error, is a child’s primary method of learning. A child is not concerned with the impressions that others get based on their drawings or mistakes.

The teaching and learning framework has undergone tremendous change with the need to infuse all learning styles – Auditory, Kinesthetic, Visual and Textual. However doodling is still not seen as a key-learning aide in schools. For instance, teacher does allow students to sketch as part of the designed activity but otherwise if a student uses drawing to explain the given situation, it is considered an offence. So much so that I have heard teacher’s saying, “this is not an art class but a math class”.   What a sham? At one end we are trying to advocate creative pedagogy (learning) and at other end, still doesn’t consider this in-born demonstrable thinking quality of child, worth developing.

Our brain is also designed for visual stimulus…

We are all aware of how our brain helps think and process information, hard facts and deal with visuals etc. Though our brain has quite a handful of chambers, they are compartmentalised and grouped into four compartments that are further grouped into two-halve distinct hemispheres. It is these hemispheres that are mainly concerned with the following aspect of information processing.

The left hemisphere, ‘thinks’ in words. The left hemisphere is the centre of language communication in terms of reading and speaking and is concerned with the comprehension and organisation of language. Any form of visual material received by this hemisphere is described in speech and writing. 

If the left hemisphere ‘thinks’ in words than it is the right hemisphere that thinks in ‘images’. It can understand simple language and carry out some of the abstract thinking using symbols and mental imageries. The right hemisphere helps us record things visually and communicates through actions and images.

The left and right hemisphere interacts and communicates with each other throughout to help us learn, comprehend, perceive and remember things. The learning might be far superior if all parts of brain are nurtured in some measure.

Roughly 75 percent of our brain is wired for vision stimulus. It means a quarter of our brain processes our perceptions/imagination/understanding through visuals.  This means we all can Doodle at-least in some capacity but then why is that only some of us can doodle.

A possible answer could be following…

“The ability to visualise might be something that is inherent to our development. However, like if we don’t nourish a plant, the plant dies, becomes shunted or its ability to produce fruits/veggies or flowers reduces. Similarly, if we don’t nourish the chambers visualisation through continuous engagement, our ability to use this significantly reduces”. 

Thoughts about visual learning and doodling from the academia

An experiments conducted by Jackie Andrade, professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth in England, demonstrated the positive effect that doodling has on memory retention. A group 40 people were given a simple set of instructions to take RSVP information over the phone from people going to a party. The group of 40 was divided in two. One group of 20 was told to doodle (limited to shading in order not to emphasise the quality of the doodles), and the other 20 would not doodle.

The group that doodled recalled 29% more information.

The study showed that doodling helps the brain to focus. It keeps the mind from wandering away from whatever is happening, whether it’s a lecture, reading or conference talk.

Further, Howard Gartner, the proponent of MI (Multiple Intelligence) theory suggests that a fuller appreciation of human cognitive capacities emerges if we take into account spatial,bodily-kinesthetic, auditory and textual. We all have these intelligences, that’s what makes us human beings, cognitively speaking. Spatial and visual are amongst the pillars of architect of learning.

Wrapping Up

I can continue on and perhaps squeeze in some more evidences regarding visual learning and doodling. Perhaps we should just stop here and indulge ourselves into doodling.

By now, we know it is a great visual tool that is well synchronised with our brain too.  Unlike adults, the young children are not resistance to change as they are still in the learning and experiencing phase. It is easy to introduce doodling to them and see how well they learn through this visual tool.

For adults it could be slightly challenging as we all come with our baggage of experience and perhaps are also aware of our learning nature. But then we all can doodle, CAN’T we. We just found (above) how our brain processes information and contribution of the visual component in helping process that information.

Try it out! I urge you to write back and tell me how doodling has benefited or boosted your brainpower.

Khushboo