According to a paper published in Applied Cognitive Psychology (which I read religiously on Monday mornings to recover from the weekend) - doodling is good for you, performance-enhancing even.
They looked at whether doodling improved or hindered attention to the primary task at hand, such as answering questions on a telephone or taking notes during a lecture.
To answer this question, 40 participants monitored a monotonous mock telephone message for the names of people coming to a party.
Half of the group was randomly assigned to a doodling condition where they shaded printed shapes while listening to the telephone call.
The doodling group recalled 29% more information on a surprise memory test.
This is interesting, because while writing this blog I have doodled:
- Chef from South Park attending a Scientology picnic naked
- a dancing, but dying, bear in a hunting scene, prancing around in high-heeled boots and a lovely feathered hat
- a pianist performing a brief solo while wearing a cock-ring, surrounded by flowers, and being re-birthed to erase some very painful childhood memories.
- a biblical version of the enlightenment of Karl Marx contemplating the theory that individual human choices count for nothing, though not completely dismissing the problematic existence of God, destiny or DNA, while Pablo Picasso gives him a blow job (see above)
My doodling seems to swing wildly between the topics of pornography, philosophy, religion, gender confusion, art, pop culture, and a dash of animal slaughter.
Yours, while still coming last in the rat race and laughing my way to defeat – but heaven forbid, I don’t want to imply it is anybody’s fault.
Righteous
p.s. For all their vaunted powers of strategy, Grand Masters of Chess tend to be a skittery and quite insane lot. When I confront them with notions like the ‘logic of the facts’, or the ‘march of history’, or the ‘laws of nature’, all I get in response is random gunfire and angry chants. These people need to re-adjust to the fact that not every problem is solvable by a game of chess.
