Doodling Is Good for Your Brain

When I was a boy, I would sometimes get in trouble at school for drawing on my desk. These were those single-seat desks made from shiny steel pipe and hard plastic. I would draw in pencil on the smooth desktop, and all I had to do to clean it off was lick my thumb and drag it across the graphite. This act was technically vandalism, but except for dulling a sharpened No. 2 pencil, it was about as nondestructive as you can get.

Nonetheless, doodling (especially on the desk) was discouraged. Mrs. Bodine, my first-grade teacher, was particularly aggrieved that I was apparently letting my mind drift instead of focusing on the lesson at hand. At first blush, that seems like a valid concern. But research suggests that suppressing my urge to doodle might have been the wrong tack. On the contrary, doodling might have helped me focus and learn Mrs. Bodine’s lessons.

In a 2009 study, Jackie Andrade, a professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth, divided 40 adults aged 18-55 into two groups. Participants in both groups were led individually to a quiet space and asked to listen to a 2 ½-minute-long dull and rambling phone answering machine message about an upcoming party. The message mentioned 16 names (8 attendees and 8 non-attendees) and multiple locations and times. Before the tape began, half the volunteers — the doodle group — were asked to shade in some little squares and circles on a piece of paper while they listened, and the other half were given no extra task. All participants were asked to write, while the tape played, only the names of those coming to the party.

When the recording ended, both groups were given a surprise quiz and asked to write down, from memory, the names of the eight attendees and the eight places mentioned in the message. Overall, the doodlers recalled 29 percent more information than the non-doodlers. What’s more, a similar study in 2020 showed that the memory benefits of doodling held whether the doodle was structured (like the shapes being filled in) or unstructured.

How could doodling help maintain focus and improve recall?

“If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream,” Andrade writes. “A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.”

Doodling, then, is one way our brain battles boredom. “When you’re bored, your fight-or-flight system will do all that it can to rally and stay alert,” writes Srini Pillay, a psychiatrist, brain researcher, and former assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Doodling (a form of fidgeting) may be a last-ditch attempt at staying awake and attentive.”

“In addition,” Pillay continues, “paying continuous attention places a strain on the brain, and doodling may be just the break your brain needs to keep attending without losing total interest.”

But there may be more to the power of doodling than busting boredom.

“There are four ways that learners intake information,” says Sunni Brown in her 2011 TED Talk, Doodlers, Unite! “Visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinesthetic.” This last refers to movement and physical activity. “In order for us to really chew on information and do something with it, we have to engage at least two of those modalities. The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously.”

So while Mrs. Bodine was explaining, say, mixed fractions (auditory intake), I was sketching my own figures (visual, reading and writing, and kinesthetic), engaging more parts of my brain during the lesson. Doodling, then, can be an aid not just to memory, but to learning.

The word doodle itself long meant “to trifle or fritter away time aimlessly.” Today’s dictionaries still reinforce the idea that doodling is a pointless, mindless diversion. But, as Sunni Brown stresses in her book The Doodle Revolution, “There is no such thing as a mindless doodle.” If it were mindless, or indeed detrimental to concentration or understanding, we wouldn’t expect to find some of humanity’s greatest minds regularly engaged in it.

Leonardo DaVinci, Nicola Tesla, Bill Gates, Fyodor Dostoevsky, J.R.R. Tolkien, and presidents Jefferson and Kennedy were all inveterate doodlers. If doodling helped these inventors, intellectuals, and artists, shouldn’t we all be doodling? Some of us hold ourselves back from doodling because we were told or convinced ourselves that “we can’t draw.” But drawing and doodling are not the same thing. As artist and writer Matthew Battles writes in The American Scholar, doodling, unlike drawing, “is beyond craft and criticism; it belongs to us all; it’s impossible to do it badly — or well.”

So I say, don’t let the Mrs. Bodines of the world keep you down: Doodle away. Let yourself loose on scratchpads, leftover paper, or the margins of meeting agendas. Perhaps you won’t craft the next great work of art, but you can stay awake and attentive and improve your memory and your ability to learn.

You have nothing to lose but blank space.

Andy Hollandbeck is senior managing editor of the Post and an incorrigible doodler.

This article is featured in the July/August 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.