Sketchy Brain Booster: Doodling
Good news, doodlers: What your colleagues consider a distracting, time-wasting habit may actually give you a leg up on them by helping you pay attention.
Asked to remember names they’d heard on a recording, people who doodled while listening had better recall than those who didn’t. This suggests that a slightly distracting secondary task may actually improve concentration during the performance of dull tasks that would otherwise cause a mind to wander.
“People may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate,” said study co-author Jackie Andrade, a University of Plymouth psychologist. “We might not be aware that we’re doing it, but it could be a trick that people develop because it helps them from wandering off into a daydream.”
“The exciting thing is that people actually got better while doing two things at once,” said Andrade. “Doodling is not as bad a thing as we might think.”
Photo by adamci/weirdvis.
Jaclyn on March 6th, 2009 12:57 pm
That is very interesting. however, i wouldn’t say that it is a slightly distracting task…i would describe it more as your doing something active which is keeping your brain more active then it would be had you not been doodling…meaning the more active and alert your brain is then the more your memory will retain.
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