Doodle Your Ideas Into Reality

by | Apr 17, 2018 | Blog

When most people think of doodling they think of a way of passing the time, escaping from boredom. In reality, doodling is a powerful way to capture your ideas. Doodles are idea snapshots that can be connected through time so that your ideas can become reality.

For all of his adult life Mat Bevel Company president Ned Schaper has rarely let a day go by without a doodle. He says “It’s the daily doodle that has enabled me to record my thoughts and construct ideas through time.”

Our thoughts evolve every day but it’s impossible to see this progression or do anything with it if we leave those ideas in our brain. To actualize our ideas, we must put them on paper and refer back to them. The doodle is a great way to do this.

In fact, a study published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology found that doodling can improve the ability to remember information by nearly 30%. Doodling can free up short- and long-term memory, improve content retention and increase attention span. Doodling can also produce creative thoughts and problem-solving insights, because it stimulates default networks in the brain that help us analyze information differently.

To support The Universe Within program in schools, consider making a donation or purchasing a fun doodle shirt like this one from the World of Beveldom.

Sunni Brown, author of The Doodle Revolution, teaches “applied visual thinking”– a.k.a doodling–to coders, designers, and even journalists. She says, “[Doodling] gets the neurons to fire and expands the mind.” Just why and how this happens is the topic of Brown’s recent book, The Doodle Revolution. Here, she shares her doodling “dos.”

Doodling can also produce creative insight, because “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,” says Brown. Most of us use reading, writing, and talking to brainstorm, but “the human mind is very habit forming,” she says. To break that habit, you have to think in an unfamiliar medium–a visual medium.

Doodling has practical and powerful applications. Mathematicians and scientists use doodles to explain complex theories and equations. Business people use doodles to map business plans and strategies. Across the globe, people from all walks of life doodle to give visual representation and meaning to their ideas. Visual aids help us communicate and help others.

Doodling helps us focus and recall information. A large body of research indicates that visual cues help us to better retrieve and remember information. Our brain is mainly an image processor, not a word processor. In fact, the part of the brain used to process words is quite small in comparison to the part that processes visual images. You may be on the verge of a daydream when you start doodling, but the simple act of doodling will help you concentrate and kick you into visual learning mode as you create visuals.

Doodling helps us find creative solutions to problems. Not only does doodling light up different parts of the brain that could spur an ah-ha moment, it also allows you to record potential solutions. You can refer back to doodles to find answers to a problem that has been in the background of your brain.

Doodling helps us reduce stress and deal with tough challenges. Sometimes, life’s challenges can create emotional stress and impair our ability to deal with the situation at hand. Spontaneous doodles allow us to find lost puzzle pieces of memories, bringing them to the present, and making the picture of our lives more whole again. With this greater sense of self and meaning, we may be able to feel more relaxed, define the problem and figure out a way to handle the situation.

Prolong those consonants but don’t encourage misdirected faith. At the Daily Doodle the story is how you tell it.

The great thing about doodling is that you don’t have to know how to write or draw well to use its power. Schaper has been doing his daily doodle routine for 40 years, and it has never been about perfection.  He wants to capture his ideas every day. He attributes his prolific body of work to the doodle, and says, “The only way to fail is to give up.”

Diane Bleck has spent almost 20 years studying and teaching doodling. She launched The Doodle Institute following the publication of her book, Discovery Doodles: The Complete Series, which reached #1 on Amazon for Education & Professional Development the week it was released.

Bleck says, “I believe visual learning is a powerful tool for strategic thinking, brainstorming and business planning, for real life applications like math & science, or even in your personal life to help you imagine your hopes and dreams. Other applications also became apparent through my students. I saw them using doodling for health and healing. It is a tool to relieve stress and to attract positive energy into their life.”

The Universe Within is a grassroots solution to a national creative intelligence deficit that increases student capacity to innovate, problem-solve and navigate unknown situations through original thinking exercises and out-of-the-box approaches.

The Daily Doodle is part of a suite of creative thinking skills taught by Mat Bevel Company as part of an educational worldbuilding series called The Universe Within. This specific class teaches students visual thinking and the importance of recording thoughts and ideas using drawings and words. Students are encouraged to pick up where they left off the day before so that they can tackle life’s challenges, big and small, with greater imagination.

For more information contact:
Paula Schaper, Vice President 
Mat Bevel Company
520-604-6273
pschaper@matbevelcompany.org

Additional references:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2076785/?page=1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4324396/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-thinking-benefits-of-doodling-2016121510844