Thursday, February 26, 2009
I Doodle Because I’m Brilliant
Oodles of brainpower. That was almost my freakin’ nickname in high school. Probably. Unless it was “uber doodler,” which seems more likely in retrospect.
Experts said doodling stopped people from daydreaming, which was a more taxing diversion, and so was good at helping people focus on mundane tasks.
During the study, half of the volunteers were asked to colour in shapes on a piece of paper while they listened to a 2.5 minute telephone message.
The other half were left to their own devices while they listened. Both groups were told the message would be dull, the Applied Cognitive Psychology journal reported.
Afterwards, both groups were asked to write down eight specific names and eight places mentioned.
The doodlers on average recalled 7.5, while the non-doodlers only managed 5.8.
Eat my intellectual dust, non-doodlers.
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Interesting.
I doodle a lot. Especially when I’m on the phone.
I doodle when I’m on the phone, I doodle in meetings, and I doodle in class. I’ve always said that it focuses my thoughts--and it turns out to be true.
I rarely doodled in the beginning. Barely graduated high school, and puttered around college like I was placing dead-last in the World Go Cart Championship.
Yet one day, I just started doodling. And it wasn’t just random lines. Full-up sketches of mountain and river scenes. Some of them were pretty darned nice, too. Particularly for a notebook filled with notes for a Developmental Psych class.
I didn’t miss a single question in that entire semester. Four midterms and a final with perfect scores. Professor hadn’t seen anyone get a 100% on every single test before, and he had just arrived from teaching 15 years at a college in Brisbane, of all places, so he knew I wouldn’t have bought the answers from someone else.
Behold the power of doodle!
I doodle in 3D.
pffbbfftbtt.
I used to doodle all the time, but wearied of the novelty-starved art world constantly trying to steal my conceptual designs. Now I simply visualize the doodle without the crass necessity of committing it to paper. Only God could truly understand the genius of my work, so only God is permitted access to it.
(Yes, the burden of my enormous ego is truly staggering. A lesser man could not bear it.)