Stereotypical examples of doodling are found in school notebooks, often in the margins, drawn by students daydreaming or losing interest during class. Other common examples of doodling are produced during long telephone conversations if a pen and paper are available.
Popular kinds of doodles include cartoon versions of teachers or companions in a school, famous TV or comic characters, invented fictional beings, landscapes, geometric shapes, patterns and textures.
The meaning "fool, simpleton" is intended in the song title "Yankee Doodle", originally sung by British colonial troops prior to the American Revolutionary War. This is also the origin of the early eighteenth century verb to doodle, meaning "to swindle or to make a fool of". The modern meaning emerged in the 1930s either from this meaning or from the verb "to dawdle", which since the seventeenth century has had the meaning of wasting time or being lazy.
Effects on memory
According to a study published in the scientific journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, doodling can aid a person's memory by expending just enough energy to keep one from daydreaming, which demands a lot of the brain's processing power, as well as from not paying attention. Thus, it acts as a mediator between the spectrum of thinking too much or thinking too little and helps focus on the current situation. The study was done by Professor Jackie Andrade, of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, who reported that doodlers in her experiment recalled 7.5 pieces of information (out of 16 total) on average, 29% more than the average of 5.8 recalled by the control group made of non-doodlers.
Alexander Pushkin's notebooks are celebrated for their superabundance of marginal doodles, which include sketches of friends' profiles, hands, and feet. These notebooks are regarded as a work of art in their own right. Full editions of Pushkin's doodles have been undertaken on several occasions. Some of Pushkin's doodles were animated by Andrei Khrzhanovsky and Yuriy Norshteyn in the 1987 film My Favorite Time.
Nobel laureate (in literature, 1913) poet Rabindranath Tagore made huge number of doodles in his manuscript. Poet and physician John Keats doodled in the margins of his medical notes; other literary doodlers have included Samuel Beckett and Sylvia Plath. Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed the Ulam spiral for visualization of prime numbers while doodling during a boring presentation at a mathematics conference. The American artist Cindy Hinant is known for her heart doodles. Many American Presidents (including Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton) have been known to doodle during meetings.
Some doodles and drawings can be found in notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.
- Asemic writing
- Automatic writing
- Stick figure
- Stream of consciousness writing
- Ulam spiral
- Archey, Karen (2013). Hymns for Mr. Suzuki. Abrons Art Center.
Further meditating on the stereotype of female irrationality are [Cindy] Hinant’s untitled heart drawings, recalling grade school doodles made by obsessive girls killing class time by channeling her newest beau.
- "doodle", n, Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed March 23, 2012.
- Andrade, Jackie (January 2010). "What does doodling do?". Applied Cognitive Psychology 24 (1): 100–106. doi:10.1002/acp.1561.
- Stephanie Sandler. Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet. Stanford University Press, 2004. Page 156.
- David M. Bethea (ed.) The Pushkin Handbook. University of Wisconsin Pres, 2013. Page 412.
- Banerjee, Nilanjan (2011). Wings of Mistakes: Doodles of Rabindranath Tagore. Kolkata: Punascha in association with Visva-Bharati.
- Books. "Idle Doodles by Famous Authors". Flavorwire. Retrieved 2012-05-02.
- Gardner 1964, p. 122.
- Rosenberg, Karen (April 22, 2008). "Rising and Regrouping on The Lower Eastside". The New York Times. p. C28.
- "All the Presidents’ Doodles - Magazine". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2012-05-02.
|Look up doodle in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.|
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- Gardner, M. (March 1964). "Mathematical Games: The Remarkable Lore of the Prime Number". Scientific American 210: 120–128. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0364-120.
- Gombrich, E. H. "Pleasures of Boredom: Four Centuries of Doodles." In E. H. Gombrich, The Uses of Images, 212-225. Phaidon: London 1999.
- Spiegel, Alix (March 12, 2009). "Bored? Try Doodling To Keep The Brain On Task". NPR.org. Retrieved June 10, 2011.
- Hanusiak, Xenia (October 6, 2009). "The lost art of doodling". Smh.com.au. Retrieved June 10, 2011.
- "Doodling As A Creative Process". Enchantedmind.com. Retrieved June 10, 2011.
- "Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!". ted.com. Retrieved September 23, 2011.
- Malchiodi, Cathy (January 13, 2014). "Doodling Your Way to a More Mindful Life". Psychologytoday.com. Retrieved March 15, 2015.
- "Zentangle Method". Zentangle.com. Retrieved March 15, 2015.