Doodling is Brain's Work

Recently I came across a topic about Doodling. For newcomers on net, Doodling is art of drawing aimlessly. It has become widely popular after Google started using Doodling for its logo and kept changing to suit occasions, happenings, etc.. Okay now to the point, an informal research on people who Doodles has revealed interesting facts. Doodling doesn't necessarily needs to be an image to be put up somewhere, it can just like penning some irregular shapes during the office meetings or idle times in between conversations etc...

The research goes on and says like - To understand where the compulsion to doodle comes from, the first thing you need to do is look more closely at what happens to the brain when it becomes bored. According to Jackie Andrade, a professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth, though many people assume that the brain is inactive when they're bored, the reverse is actually true.

"If you look at people's brain function when they're bored, we find that they are using a lot of energy — their brains are very active," Andrade says.

The reason, she explains, is that the brain is designed to constantly process information. But when the brain finds an environment barren of stimulating information, it's a problem.

"You wouldn't want the brain to just switch off, because a bear might walk up behind you and attack you; you need to be on the lookout for something happening," Andrade says.

So when the brain lacks sufficient stimulation, it essentially goes on the prowl and scavenges for something to think about. Typically what happens in this situation is that the brain ends up manufacturing its own material.

In other words, the brain turns to daydreams, fantasies of Oscar acceptance speeches and million-dollar lottery wins. But those daydreams take up an enormous amount of energy.

Andrade tested her theory by playing a lengthy and boring tape of a telephone message to a collection of people, only half of whom had been given a doodling task. After the tape ended she quizzed them on what they had retained and found that the doodlers remembered much more than the non doodlers.

"They remembered about 29 percent more information from the tape than the people who were just listening to the tape," Andrade says.

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