Time waster or creative launchpad?
According to Sunni Brown the author of The Doodle Revolution, studies have shown that doodling can improve both short and long term memory, improve your retention and ability to recall information as well as increase attention span.
Brown claims that "when the mind starts to engage with visual language, you get neurological access that you don’t have when you're in a linguistic mode".
As a child I would get into trouble for doodling on my worksheets and as an adult I still find myself drawing little pictures in the margins of meeting papers. Interestingly it was when I started my university studies that I was introduced to brainstorming and concept mapping tools such as Mind Mapping by Tony Buzan. This sparked an interest for me as a I am very much a visual learner.
Whilst researching these new learning tools I came across Zentangle, which is really just an age old tradition about creating beautiful abstract images from repetitive patterns, made popular to the mainstream by Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts who commercialed the artform.
In my opinion at the time this had nothing to do with my search for brainstorming but I did found the idea of meditative doodling to awaken the mind, an interesting past time. However, since discovering The Doodle Revolution, I'm beginning to see it as less of a time consuming art form and more of a, for want of a better term, "creative launchpad".
Give it a go yourself. My favourite free website for learning how to Doodle is TanglePatterns.com
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