In any meeting inside any organisation in any part of the world, there is likely to be at least one doodler. This is the person who appears to be taking studious notes during the meeting, but is in actual fact busily filling the margins of their notebook with a complex mosaic of patterns, textures, shapes and figures in blue biro.
I’m always surprised when the doodler, after several uninterrupted minutes of concentrated mark making, lifts their head and adds a useful comment in the discussion that is taking place around them. How is this possible? How can they have such focused and dedicated concentration on their drawing, and yet still manage to follow the flow of the conversation?
The reason, I’ve discovered, is because although doodling and drawing look the same from the outside, are very different on the inside.
Doodling, as it turns out, is a kind of listening, not a kind of drawing. Mark making for a doodler is a way of translating the energy involved in the processing of what they are hearing in the meeting into a form of visual notation. Doodling is a lot closer to taking written notes than it is to making an image. When a doodler returns to their doodle after the meeting, the image seems to contain the memory of the things that were spoken in the room. A doodler can often look at their doodle days or even weeks later and recall elements of the conversation that took place with great precision. This is because the image takes them back to the time of creation. Although the marks are not illustrations of what has been spoken about in the meeting, the marks seem to unlock the memory of the conversation. The intricate patterns and stream-of-consciousness imagery are a kind of mnemonic hieroglyph.
The doodlers I’ve spoken to about this report that they can listen better and have greater recall when they doodle in a meeting. Some say that without doodling they would need to have eye contact with other people in the room which would be a distraction to their ability to listen effectively. Somehow, by doodling, they effectively create an internal feedback loop that transfers the energy involved in processing what is being heard into a graphic mark that serves as both a record of the information and a key to unlock the memory of the discussion at a later date.
But I find doodling very odd. This is because I draw, but I don’t doodle. Actually it’s not that I don’t doodle, it’s that I can’t doodle. I don’t have anything against doodling (it looks like a great way to spend time in a meeting, and it has practical benefits), it’s just that the second my pen touches the paper to create an image, my focus shifts entirely to the drawing being created and my awareness of the conversation around me stops almost entirely. I don’t understand how people can draw and listen at the same time. My brain just isn’t wired for doodling. And I suspect it is the same for many people who draw.
Drawing, for me, is an all-consuming act of decision-making and selection. Even casual sketching requires a degree of focus that won’t allow information that is not central to the creation of the image to interrupt the flow of the thinking-deciding-mark making. So drawing, for me, is very different from doodling. Doodling is a way to listen and recall. Drawing is a way to see and translate.
Next time you see someone in a meeting making an image, ask them whether they are doodling or drawing. If they’re doodling, then let them carry on, but if they’re drawing then it might be best to suggest they put down their pen and pay attention.
[For more on this, you can see a very passionate and lucid description of the doodling process and its advantages in a TED talk by Sunni Brown at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sunni_brown.html
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