The Art of Doodling

Remember those days when the margins of your notebooks used to be filled with squiggles, hearts and clumsily drawn people? Newly painted chairs and desks were dreams come true as we turned every inch into our canvas. Perhaps you remember a time when your teacher caught you drawing a caricature of them and you were promptly taken to the principal's office for a dose of scolding. That probably did not stop you! However, as we age, most of us lose our love for doodling. I am not asking you to deface public property, but what I am telling you is: don't stop. 

According to studies, doodling has a vast number of cognitive benefits. It can free up both short and long term memory, improve retention of content and increase your attention span. When our minds start to engage with visual language, such as during doodling, we get neurological access that we don't have when we are in linguistic mode, such as when we are reading, writing and talking. As we grow, we tend to adopt linguistic practices to brainstorm, however to gain creative insight, we must break this habit and think in the unfamiliar visual medium. 

If you are unsure about your artistic skills, remember that the aesthetic quality of the doodle does not matter! Skill has nothing to do with the quality of the learning experience for a doodler. Even drawing something extremely ugly can teach you something significant. If you are having trouble thinking through a problem, create a visual display of the sequence of events in your problem. This helps because sometimes the brain makes sense of a complex system better by looking at pictures than words. To stir your creative abilities, take two unrelated things (like elephants and ice cream) and draw them out. Then draw things that randomly fuse these parts together, such as melting ears or trunk cones. Let your creativity flow free and this method can help you come up with unique angles to your subject. 

For most people the question isn't "when did you start drawing?" but "when did you stop drawing?" Most of us drew and doodled at some point of our lives. Reviving that childhood enjoyment, that ability to play freely is essential to finding good ideas. This resurrection can be done through doodling. 

By Maisha Rumelia Rahman