WHY IT’S GOOD TO PICK UP A PENCIL NOW AND THEN

By: Donald M. Rattner

The keyboard is all well and good for articulating certain thoughts and ideas, but relying on typed text could be shortchanging your ability to generate novel insights. Here are a few reasons why doodling and other forms of visual thinking can boost professional performance and personal wellbeing:

IDEA CAPTURE
Ideas are often fleeting. Doodling helps us concretize our initial thoughts quickly and intuitively, thereby lessening the risk of our forgetting them as a result of the brain’s limited capacity for retaining short-term memories.

IDEA DEVELOPMENT
Few ideas are born fully hatched. Doodling lets you start at as small a scale as you want and then build up as your thoughts develop and your information expands.

BRAIN AND BODY CONDITIONING
Doodling by hand can not only advance a project, it can also bolster your own mental and physical state. Numerous studies indicate that recurring motions of the hand energize regions of the brain associated with creativity and long-term neurological health.

Image credit: Writing chair. Artisan unknown. American. Early 19th century. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.