A lot of people hate doodlers, those who idly scribble during meetings . Most people also hate that other closely related species: the fidgeter, who spins pens or re-orders papers or plays with his phone during meetings. We doodlers, fidgeters and whisperers always get the same jokey, passive-aggressive line from the
authority figure at the front of the room: “I’m sorry, are we bothering you?” How droll. But the underlying message is clear: pay attention.
But I’ve never stopped fidgeting, and I’ve always thought I walked out of meetings remembering all the relevant parts. Now I have proof. In a delightful new study, which will be published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, psychologist Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth in southern England showed that doodlers actually remember more than non-doodlers when asked to retain tediously delivered information, like, say, during a boring meeting or a lecture.
In her small but rigorous study, Andrade separated 40 participants into two groups of 20. All 40 had just finished an unrelated psychological experiment, and many were thinking of going home . They were asked, instead, whether they wouldn’t mind spending another five minutes helping with research. The participants were led into a quiet room and then asked to listen to a two-and-a-half-minute tape that they were told would be “rather dull.”
That’s a shocking bit of understatement. The tape — which Guantanamo officials should consider as a method of non-lethal torture — was a rambling voice-mail message that purports to invite the listener to a 21st-birthday party. The party’s host talks about someone’s sick cat;
she mentions her redecorated kitchen, the weather, someone’s new house in Colchester, and a vacation in Edinburgh that involved museums and rain. In all, she mentions eight place names and eight people who are definitely coming to the party.
Before the tape began, half the study participants were asked to shade in some little squares and circles on a piece of paper while they listened. They were told not to worry about being neat or quick about it. The other 20 didn’t doodle. All the participants were asked to write down the names of those coming to the party while the tape played, which meant the doodlers switched between their doodles and their lists.
Afterward, the papers were removed and the 40 volunteers were asked to recall, verbally, the place names and the names of the people coming to the party. The doodlers creamed the non-doodlers: those who doodled during the
tape recalled 7.5 pieces of information on average, 29% more than the average of 5.8 recalled by the control group.
Why does doodling aid memory Andrade offers several theories, but the most persuasive is that when you doodle, you don’t daydream. Daydreaming may seem absentminded and pointless, but it actually demands a lot of the brain’s processing power. You start
daydreaming about a vacation, which leads you to think about potential destinations, how you would pay for the trip, whether you could get the flight upgraded, how you might score a bigger hotel room. These cognitions require what psychologists call “executive functioning” — for example, planning for the future and comparing costs and benefits.
Doodling, by contrast, requires very few executive resources, but just enough cognitive effort to keep you from daydreaming, which — if unchecked — will jumpstart activity in cortical networks that will keep you from remembering what’s going on. Doodling forces your brain to spend
just enough energy to stop it from daydreaming but not so much that you don’t pay attention.
So the next time you’re doodling during a meeting — or twirling a pencil or checking the underside of the table for gum — and you hear that familiar admonition , you can tell the boss with
confidence that you’ve been paying attention to every word.
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