A wonderful habit! A wonderful finding on this wonderful Saturday morning.
While I was reading this article on yahoo!, I thought of my own experience and also inattentiveness problem of the 10-year-old boy at my house.

The article claims that doodling while listening actually helps you pay attention and enhance your memory. The research was carried out in the United Kingdom and published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

“If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream … Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task,” said the researcher. A wonder pill! I was thinking of sharing this with my sister who can use this pill on her son’s hard-to-cure attention problem at school.

“In psychology, tests of memory or attention will often use a second task to selectively block a particular mental process,” said the researcher. “If that process is important for the main cognitive task, then performance will be impaired. My research shows that beneficial effects of secondary tasks, such as doodling, on concentration may offset the effects of selective blockade.”

I like doodling, in a better word, note taking, while at a meeting, a habit formed while I was at school. It might have prevented attention-deficit problem or might have helped me to write more. Up to now, I still find it hard to give constant full attention when a meeting is getting boringly long, thus starting taking notes. Old habit dies hard! It at least helps keep my eyes open and give due respect to the speaker. Now the benefit of doodling has been confirmed through research — a piece of good news to parents whose children are in need of giving attention in class.