Reading Response: The Miseducation of the Doodle

My eyes were immediately caught by the title of this article, and after reading it, I discovered a lot scientific parts about doodling and confirmed some of my thoughts.

One thing I find very true is when the author talks about that unlike common beliefs about the uselessness of doodling, doodling is actually your mind trying to not be mindless. I’ve found, since a very young age, that doodling helped with my concentration in class. Although my hand was drawing little faces and people, I could clearly feel the process of the teacher’s voice entering my ear and then my brain, which then dealt with those sentences and broke them down. It was a magical feeling -- it’s usually rare to find yourself “knowing” your mind’s procedures. However, my teachers didn’t like the fact that I was “drawing random, useless stuff and wasting time”. Almost all of my teachers tried hard to stop me from doodling and this restriction was especially harsh when I was in elementary school in China. Not only that, my teachers also required every student to sit up straight without moving a bit, putting hands on the desk, and they prohibited us from going to the bathroom during classes. It was not until university when I was quite sure that doodling helped with my thinking, and this article further confirmed my personal feelings.

The other point that I learned from this article is about strategic doodling. The author showed what kind of doodle is the most helpful when it comes to helping with memorizing and thinking. I realized that the points such bullets, frames, connectors, and faces were already used by me since a long time ago, but now I know that the concept behind all of these is to “build a visual landscape” that can aid the brain’s functioning by helping create a more creative, fun, and memorable environment.

In summary, “The Miseducation of the Doodle” not only clarified some of my thoughts on doodling but also resonated with my personal habits. Now that I learned some more from the analytical side, I believe I can further utilize this technique to aid my studying.