Doodle Away!

This week I Realized how much I draw (aka doodle) in my books for absolutely no reason...  and everyone else is too.  The video we watched in class got me thinking about how many student really pay attention in class (forget about the amount that do not even go) and all the different ways that they do this. I have realized that about half of the people who are in class and awake are on their computers doing various things ranging from Facebook to writing a paper for another class. While the rest of the class is doodling. So this is bad right? No one is really taking in any information? Wrong. According to a TIME Science article research shows that people who doodle actually retain more information than those who are doing other tasks. To explain it simply, daydreaming or doing other tasks takes up too much of your brain for you to still be able to focus; doodling on the other hand does not. Doodling usually consists of simple shapes and shading, something that is not very difficult for the brain to handle. Also if you are drawing you are focused on that and your brain would not trail off and think about anything other than what is going on in class. The lecture kind of becomes your background music.

So this week instead of an oil pastel drawing I decided to give this idea a try and doodle in my classes and it actually worked! Between notes I would draw random things like these

Then after I got back to my dorm I would try to write down what I remembered from the lecture and there was a lot more that I retained compared to when I would just stare blankly at the professor (hmm I never seem to have a problem in Ben’s class J).

So since you are reading this I want all of you guys to try it and see the results.

Here is the article