The Neuroscience of Doodling: Understanding Attention and Creativity

Exploring the Role of Doodling in Sustaining Focus and Enhancing Recall

I’ve always been a doodler. Little spirals in the margins, shaded in boxes during long call or even that little Superman “S” everyone made connecting the 6 dashes. You know exactly which one Im talking about. I’d always find myself making random shapes during lectures in Uni or highschool and teachers scolded me for it. I assumed it was just a quirky way to pass time and waste ink haha. But the more I started digging into the research, the more I realized something really interesting: doodling isn’t just mindless scribbling. It’s your brain doing some of its best work when you’re not even trying.

There’s real science showing that these little lines and shapes can sharpen your memory, steady your focus when things get boring, and even open up space for creativity. What looks like a distraction from the outside is actually a hidden kind of attention. We’re going to explore what’s happening in your head when your pen wanders. From studies on memory and attention to what neuroscientists are finding about creativity and networks in the brain.

Doodling is not zoning out

The study most people cite when talking about doodling is a simple yet clever experiment by psychologist Jackie Andrade. (Link to study provided) Participants listened to a deliberately dull, two-and-a-half-minute voice message and had to recall names afterward. Half were asked to shade in simple shapes (a standardized, low-effort “doodle”) while listening; the other half did nothing special. The doodlers remembered significantly more. About 29% better on the memory test, to be more specific, than the non-doodlers. Andrade’s interpretation was that a light secondary motor task can keep arousal in that “not too low, not too high” band, reducing mind-wandering and sustaining attention during monotony.

This effect makes sense when we think about how the brain handles attention. Under normal conditions, our focus naturally oscillates between external events and internally generated thoughts. Neuroscientists call this shift “perceptual decoupling,” and it is one of the reasons we can so easily slip into mind-wandering during boring tasks. Doodling provides a kind of attentional scaffold. A light motor activity that holds arousal at just the right level, preventing the brain from disengaging entirely. Instead of spacing out, doodlers hover in that sweet spot of engagement, neither over-stimulated nor under-stimulated.

Beyond Andrade’s shaded-shapes task, there’s robust evidence for what psychologists call “the drawing effect”: sketching the thing you’re trying to remember is one of the most reliable ways to encode it. Across seven experiments, Wammes, Meade, and Fernandes showed that drawing words (instead of writing them) consistently boosts free recall. Participants who drew words they were trying to remember later recalled them far better than participants who merely wrote them down. The advantage comes not from artistic skill but from the way drawing engages multiple systems at once: semantic knowledge of the word, the visual image being produced, and the motor action of sketching it. This multimodal encoding means the brain has more retrieval routes available later. The act of drawing even crude, fast sketches dramatically strengthens memory compared to text alone.

All of this dovetails with Allan Paivio’s dual coding theory, which argues that information is processed more effectively when encoded both verbally and visually. Doodling, even when unstructured, engages the imagery system alongside the verbal system. That is why even the most rudimentary icons like a clock for time, a ladder for hierarchy, a simple stick figure, can have outsized effects on recall and understanding. For students, professionals, or anyone trying to learn, integrating doodles into notes is not just decoration but a scientifically supported strategy for remembering.

A practical translation: if you’re listening to a lecture or brainstorming, doodling relevant icons, arrows, containers, and quick thumbnails (instead of abstract swirlies) can materially improve what you remember.

What Doodling Is Doing In The Brain

When people draw, a wide set of brain circuits come online: the sensorimotor systems coordinating hand movement, the visual pathways translating concept into shape, and higher-order regions responsible for spatial reasoning. fMRI research has shown that even imagining handwriting or simple drawing activates much of the same neural network as actually doing it. Over time, training in drawing alters functional responses in visual and parietal regions, suggesting that making marks physically changes how the brain encodes spatial information. More broadly, creativity studies highlight how drawing or doodling may encourage cooperation between two major brain networks: the default mode network, which supports mind-wandering and loose association, and the executive control network, which helps evaluate and structure ideas. Creative thinking thrives when these two systems are in dialogue, and doodling seems to create exactly the permissive mental state where this interplay is possible.

A related line of work explores the role of incubation in creativity. In a classic set of experiments, Benjamin Baird and colleagues had people tackle creativity problems, then take a break with either a demanding task, an undemanding task (ideal for mind-wandering), or rest, before returning to the problems. Performance improved most after the undemanding task, consistent with the idea that incubation thrives when attention is lightly engaged but free enough to roam and recombine ideas. The explanation is that light activity occupies the surface level of attention, freeing the deeper networks of the brain to recombine ideas in novel ways. Doodling, with its rhythmic but low-demand motor engagement, functions much like these incubation tasks. It is structured enough to prevent the mind from wandering into distraction yet open enough to allow new associations to emerge.

But Isn’t Doodle A Distraction? There Are Boundaries

Doodling is not a panacea. If the primary task is already at your cognitive limits (a complex math proof you’re actively solving in your head), adding any secondary activity can hurt performance. The gains show up most clearly when tasks are under-loading attention. Im talking about boring, repetitive, or passive intake, where a light motor task protects against under-arousal and the related drift. In those contexts, doodling functions as a life raft for attention. The boundary condition is important: doodling helps when tasks under-load attention, but not when they already max it out.

A good heuristic: if you catch yourself rereading the same sentence three times, try doodling. If you’re actively synthesizing or computing, put the pen down and go full focus.

Answers to Common Objections

Of course, not everyone is convinced by the case for doodling. Some objections come up repeatedly, and they are worth addressing directly.

The first is the claim that doodling is only for artists, or at least for people with some kind of visual flair. Many people dismiss their own ability to draw, saying “I can’t even draw a stick figure,” and assume that means they can’t benefit from doodling. But the research tells a different story. The memory advantage discovered in studies on the drawing effect did not depend on artistic skill. Participants who drew crude sketches, even those that looked like a collection of wobbly lines, still showed significantly better recall than those who only wrote words. The brain is not judging the aesthetics of the doodle; it is responding to the layered process of turning a concept into a visual mark. Whether the sketch is beautiful or barely legible, the act of drawing recruits visual and motor systems that deepen encoding. To doodle well, in other words, you do not need to be an artist. You only need a pen and the willingness to make marks.

A second objection is the worry that doodling will cause important details to slip by unnoticed. The fear is understandable: if your pen is busy shading a box, how can you possibly listen to every word being spoken? But here again, studies complicate the intuition. Jackie Andrade’s experiment showed that doodlers actually remembered more details, not fewer, because the doodling stabilized attention rather than derailing it. Of course, there are limits. If someone tries to produce elaborate illustrations while listening, the drawing itself may start competing with the auditory task. The trick is to keep the doodle simple, repetitive, and low-demand. Crosshatching, shading, or drawing repeating shapes gives the attentional benefits without pulling resources away from comprehension.

Finally, some insist that doodling is simply a waste of time, a childish indulgence that has no place in serious work or study. This objection stems from a narrow view of productivity, one that equates stillness and silence with attention and assumes that idle motion must be counterproductive. But the evidence challenges that assumption. Far from wasting time, doodling often rescues attention from boredom and sustains it through monotonous tasks. If anything, the wasted time is what happens when we try to suppress our natural fidgeting instincts and end up mind-wandering completely, missing the very information we hoped to capture. Doodling, paradoxically, can be one of the most efficient ways to use our “idle” minutes.

A Closing Argument For Idle Creativity

Doodling challenges cultural assumptions about what it means to pay attention. We often equate attention with rigidity: eyes forward, hands still, body quiet. But the human brain is not built to function like a spotlight that never moves. It is a dynamic system that thrives on balance and gentle stimulation. Now don’t get me wrong, complex problem solving still often requires undivided focus, and no amount of shading will substitute for deep engagement. But in the contexts where attention wavers like long lectures, repetitive meetings, or brainstorming sessions, doodling is not the enemy. It is a tool, one validated by science and available to anyone, no matter their drawing ability. Doodling represents an alternative model of attention: one where idle creativity provides the stability needed to stay present and the looseness needed for ideas to surface. It is not the opposite of focus but a different form of it. Far from being a childish distraction, doodling is one of the brain’s oldest tricks for staying awake and remembering better. So draw the spiral. Shade the boxes. Sketch the ladder. Make your little Superman “S”.

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