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The meeting is in its second hour. The presenter is on slide 47. Across the table, a colleague’s pen is moving steadily, filling the margins of her notepad with spirals, boxes and little shaded stars.
It looks like she’s tuned out. But research suggests the opposite may be true. Her doodles might be the very thing keeping her in the room.
A deliberately boring phone call
In 2010, psychologist Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth set out to test whether doodling helps or hurts concentration. She recruited 40 people aged 18 to 55 and played them a recorded phone message that was designed to be dull.
The message rambled on for about two and a half minutes about a party. A woman talked about who could and couldn’t come, along with unrelated details about places and plans. Participants were told to write down the names of people who would be attending.
Half the group were also asked to shade in printed shapes on a sheet of paper while they listened. The other half simply listened. Neither group knew they’d be tested on the message afterward.
The doodlers remembered more
The doodlers did better on the main task, catching more of the names of people coming to the party. Then came the surprise test, asking participants to recall as many names and places from the message as they could.
The doodling group remembered an average of 7.5 pieces of information, compared with about 5.8 for the group that just listened. That’s 29 percent more.
At first glance, it seems backward. Doing two things at once usually makes people worse at both. So why would shading shapes help?
Keeping the mind from wandering
Andrade’s explanation centered on daydreaming. When a task is boring, the mind tends to wander, drifting off to tonight’s dinner, tomorrow’s to-do list or a conversation from last week.
Mind-wandering takes up mental resources. When it happens, we stop paying attention to what’s in front of us, and information slips past without being stored.
Doodling, she suggested, sits in a sweet spot. It’s simple enough to require very little thought, but engaging enough to keep the brain from slipping into a full daydream. In that sense, the doodle acts like a tether, keeping attention close to the task at hand.
Inside the wandering brain
Neuroscientists have linked mind-wandering to the default mode network, a set of brain regions that includes parts of the cingulate cortex. This network becomes more active when we turn inward, thinking about ourselves, the past or the future, rather than focusing on the outside world.
When the default mode network takes over during a dull task, we’re less likely to encode what we hear into memory. Forming lasting memories depends heavily on the hippocampus, and that process works best when we’re actually paying attention.
Andrade’s study didn’t measure brain activity, so it can’t show that doodling reduced default mode activity. But the idea fits with what’s known about how attention and memory work.
Not all doodles are equal
Later research has added important caveats. In a 2017 study, Jason Boggs and colleagues compared different types of doodling. People who did structured doodling, like shading in shapes, did well. But people who doodled freely, drawing whatever they liked, performed significantly worse than those who did structured doodling or took notes.
That makes sense. Free drawing can become absorbing, pulling attention toward the picture instead of away from daydreams. A larger study published in 2024 also failed to find that doodling reduced mind-wandering or improved memory, and found that note-taking worked better.
So the evidence is mixed. Doodling may help some people in some situations, especially with simple, repetitive marks during a truly boring task. But it’s not a guaranteed memory booster.
Should you doodle in meetings?
If you find your mind wandering during long meetings, simple doodling might help you stay present. Repetitive patterns, shading or tracing shapes are more likely to help than detailed drawings.
Taking notes may be even better, since it forces you to process what you hear. Some people combine the two, jotting key points and doodling in between.
And if you see a colleague quietly filling their notepad with spirals, there’s no need to assume they’ve stopped listening. They may simply have found their own way to stay with you.
