Summary
News Article Summary
In an article titled The Cognitive Benefits of Doodling, the author Steven Heller (2015) have stated that whenever an individual is drawing an object, their mind becomes intensively and deeply involved in it leading to them paying special attention to what they are doing. It is through this art of paying attention that enables a person to understand whatever that they are drawing since they remain fully conscious about it. The study revealed that this is some sort of supremacy that humans have over digital media and computers that are not in a position to pay any special attention to drawing or sketching because of their nature of being a machine (Heller, 2015). An act such as doodling is more essential since it involves people expressing their emotions apart from the regular concepts of drawing. In that regard, the author found that any person who is drawing or using a brush, a pen or a pencil are actively involving their brains in the process. Activities like doodling involve actively engaging and exercising the brain which makes the ideas being doodled tangible. It is the reason doodlers are able to explain o recall any information that appears as dull compared to non-doodlers since to them the entire process is like daydreaming (Heller, 2015). The study also revealed that it is possible for doodling to be used by people as a tool to transform their neurological and physical experience.
Summary of the journal paper
In an article titled What Does Doodling Do, the aim of Jackie Andrade (2010) was to discover the potential of doodling especially its ability to either hinder or improve people’s attention. In order to find out the truth behind this study, he decided to involve 40 people to take part in the experiment. The individuals were monitored in a monotonous way using telephone messages. Twenty participants were assigned in a random way a doodling. By the end of the study, the group who were assigned doodling performed much better than the non-doodlers revealing the benefits of this process while working. According to the study, doodling has a way of aiding people’s concentration which has psychological and practical implications on every doodler (Andrade, 2010). The mechanism that makes doodling aid concentration is that it helps in stabilizing arousal at the highest level enabling the doodler to remain awake all through the process. At the same time, doodling can help in minimizing autonomic arousals at the highest levels which is mostly associated with boredom (Andrade, 2010).
The other hypothesis that the author managed to come up with is that doodling has the potential to reduce daydreaming especially in cases whereby daydreaming is more detrimental than the performance of doodling itself. The reason people day dream is because they have high levels of arousal caused by boredom thus when doodling, they become more actively involved in the process enabling the doodler to remain active. It means that doodling minimizes daydreaming by adding more resources to a task that is already demanding which causes a demand for attention to paid on the main task being performed. Based on these findings, the author came to a conclusion that in order to understand the role that daydreaming and boredom plays, it is important to have a thorough study on the cognitive ability of people while performing tasks such as doodling or in real-life work experience in places such as schools where education is offered and paying attention is crucial (Andrade, 2010). These findings by the author are true because as people become more involved in demanding activities, the rate of concentration becomes elevated thus removing boredom.
References
Andrade, J. (2010). What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology 24, 100-106. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1561/epdf?referrer_access_token=PoQVNzQwU5qMekBlgJhv9E4keas67K9QMdWULTWMo8Mxj7mPKVFnRVp2iP2ZOpgQ4Xl9R0Gsn8ZoAy6CsfV-dlHRPdvQPAO4jTaKYmDVE-n8eeLzY85ked2WdO0lI7LLrKyPMReDs3hCjoU__n2G0P9MtqL38cf12ug8oaLmqC3JxeqBpoBPU4vpxt2TDXz5pkx6ByZPEdLGtc87kVlsFYUyEWWZpx7aowfhIPbg-_bx-2CbjCvLTznmgekKXrHl5uRNR22CfqppKQ2seDPkFA%3D%3D
Heller, S. (2015, July 9). The cognitive benefits of doodling. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/doodling-for-cognitive-benefits/398027/