There has been a miniboom of articles on the benefits of doodling. The trigger appears to have been an Applied Cognitive Psychology article by Jackie Andrade in 2009, which found that doodlers recall 29 percent more than non-doodlers when quizzed on a list of names they heard in an earlier voice call. Andrade and others theorize that, to the contrary of conventional wisdom, doodling keeps a distracted mind focused and/or aroused.

So focused and aroused that consultants now push doodling and drawing as an aid to thinking. The consultant receiving perhaps the most press is Sunni Brown, who wrote the 2014 book, The Doodle Revolution: Unlock the Power to Think Differently. She now consults with businesspeople.

What’s the doodle do? Using your fingers to form letters and shapes has a deep effect on the mind. After experiments that compared handwriting and keyboarding, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer wrote in Psychological Science: “The present research suggests that...[keyboarding on laptops] results in shallower processing.”

In “The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard,” Mueller and Oppenheimer showed that students who took notes on a lecture performed much better afterwards in answering conceptual questions than those typing notes into their laptops. 

Gabriela Goldschmidt of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology noted that doodling is even better than writing. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, doodling, she says, ignites a “dialog between the mind and the hand holding a pencil and the eyes that perceive the marks on paper.”

Cathy Malchiodi, an expert in art therapy, says in Psychology Today that doodling is a “whole brain” activity. She and other therapists have long used art to help patients merge explicit (narrative) and implicit (sensory) memory. “Doodling is not just a way to ‘think differently,’” she writes, “it’s a way to ‘feel differently,’ too.”

What’s this mean for authors? Short answer: Sketching, penciling in the margin, writing in cursive, drawing artful letters, playing with symbols—these all open new thinking pathways and broaden perspective.

In Trends in Neuroscience and Education, Karin James and Lauren Engelhardt reported that children who write letters freehand engage more parts of their brains. Brain images of the children’s “reading circuit” light up during handwriting, while that same circuit remains relatively inactive during keyboarding the same letters.

So the next time you’re stuck in a merry-go-round of repetitive dull thoughts, grab a paper tablet. Let the pencil—not the keyboard—be your friend. A few flourishes with the fingers can kick start the idle parts of your brain.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published Decembe 1, 2014]