Doodle Your Way to Creative Thinking
Posted by Stuart Somer on Fri, Dec 30, 2011 @ 09:33 AM
I have a confession. I’m a doodler. Whenever I have a pen and paper to take notes; in meetings, on the phone, when I’m bored and when I’m not. Since I’ve often been “the creative guy” at many of my jobs, it hasn’t been a big issue. But many people have been discouraged from doodling by teachers, parents, and bosses who call it a wasteful activity.
So I was glad to see this TED video today: "Doodlers, Unite!" by Sunni Brown. It’s only six minutes and if you’re a doodler it will make you feel better about your addiction. And if you’re not, it has some great info on Visual Thinking.
Her main point is that doodling is a powerful tool that actually helps people think. We can retain information at a higher rate when we doodle, and we are able to process that information more efficiently, because it engages more of our senses, mind and body. Need to solve a problem? Try doodling your way to a solution.
During the past fifty years we have made huge leaps in our understanding of how our brain works and how people learn. The old model of learning via a professor lecturing to a roomful of note taking students, or by studying the linguistically dense textbook, has been found to be inefficient and a weak purveyor of knowledge. Reading or listening to someone inform us of facts is fleeting knowledge, easily lost. Just ask a student a week after the exam how much they actually remember. No one wants a medical student to operate who has only read about an operation or listened to a lecture about operating.
At Andromeda Training, we run workshops in which teams learn business and finance by running a business in a game-based simulation. It’s fun, competitive and provides a rich learning experience engaging students on many levels.
I hope you enjoyed Sunni’s video as much as I did. Check out our video if you want to see our business training game in action.