
A doodle is a
drawing
Drawing is a Visual arts, visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface, or a digital representation of such. Traditionally, the instruments used to make a drawing include pencils, crayons, and ink pens, some ...
made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied. Doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be composed of random and
abstract lines or shapes, generally without ever lifting the drawing device from the paper, in which case it is usually called a scribble.
Doodling and scribbling are most often associated with young children and
toddler
A toddler is a child approximately 1 to 3 years old, though definitions vary. The toddler years are a time of great cognitive, emotional and social development. The word is derived from "toddle", which means to walk unsteadily, as children at thi ...
s, because their lack of
hand–eye coordination and lower mental development often make it very difficult for any young child to keep their
coloring attempts within the line art of the subject. Despite this, it is not uncommon to see such behavior with adults, in which case it is generally done jovially, out of boredom.
Typical examples of doodling are found in school notebooks, often in the margins, drawn by students
daydreaming
Daydreaming is a stream of consciousness that detaches from current external tasks when one's attention becomes focused on a more personal and internal direction.
Various names of this phenomenon exist, including mind-wandering, fantasies, a ...
or losing interest during class.
Other common examples of doodling are produced during long
telephone
A telephone, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that enables two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most ...
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, textures, or phallic scenes. Most people who doodle often remake the same shape or type of doodle throughout their lifetime.
Etymology
The word ''doodle'' first appeared in the early 17th century to mean a fool or simpleton.
It may derive from the German ''Dudeltopf'' or ''Dudeldop'', meaning simpleton or noodle (literally "nightcap").
It is the origin of the early eighteenth-century verb ''to doodle'', meaning "to swindle or to make a fool of". The modern meaning emerged as a term for a politician who was doing nothing in office at the expense of his constituents.
That led to the more generalized verb "to doodle", which means to do nothing.
In the final courtroom scene of the 1936 film ''
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
''Mr. Deeds Goes to Town'' is a 1936 American comedy-drama romance film directed by Frank Capra and starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur in her first featured role. Based on the 1935 short story "Opera Hat" by Clarence Budington Kelland, whi ...
'', the main character explains the concept of "doodling" to a judge unfamiliar with the word, saying that "People draw the most idiotic pictures when they're thinking."
The character, who has travelled from a fictional town in
Vermont
Vermont () is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, New York (state), New York to the west, and the Provinces and territories of Ca ...
, describes the word ''doodler'' as being "a name we made up back home" for people who make "foolish designs" on paper when their mind is on something else.
The meaning "fool, simpleton" is intended in the song title "
Yankee Doodle
"Yankee Doodle" is a traditional song and nursery rhyme, the early versions of which predate the Seven Years' War and American Revolutionary War. It is often sung patriotically in the United States today. It is the state song of the U.S. ...
", originally sung by British colonial troops during the
American Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was the armed conflict that comprised the final eight years of the broader American Revolution, in which Am ...
.
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
The University of Plymouth is a public research university based predominantly in Plymouth, England, where the main campus is located, but the university has campuses and affiliated colleges across South West England. With students, it is the ...
, 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.
Doodling has positive effects on human comprehension as well. Creating visual depictions of information allows for a deeper understanding of material being learned. When doodling, a person is engaging neurological pathways in ways that allow for effective and efficient sifting and processing of information.
For these reasons, doodling is used as an effective study tool and memory device.
As a therapeutic device
Doodling can be used as a stress relieving technique. This is similar to other motor activities such as
fidgeting
Fidgeting is the act of moving about restlessly in a way that is not ( socially recognized as) essential to ongoing tasks or events. Fidgeting may involve playing with one's fingers, hair, or personal objects (e.g. glasses, pens or items of clot ...
or pacing that are also used to alleviate mental stress. According to a review of over 9,000 submitted doodles, nearly 2/3 of respondents recalled doodling when in a "tense or restless state" as a means to reduce those feelings. Scientists believe that doodling's stress relieving properties arise from the way that the act of doodling engages with the brain's
default mode network
In neuroscience, the default mode network (DMN), also known as the default network, default state network, or anatomically the medial frontoparietal network (M-FPN), is a large-scale brain network primarily composed of the dorsal medial prefro ...
.
According to
graphologist
Graphology is the analysis of handwriting in an attempt to determine the writer's personality traits. Its methods and conclusions are not supported by scientific evidence, and as such it is considered to be a pseudoscience.
Graphology has been ...
and behavior specialist Ingrid Seger-Woznicki, "we
oodle
Oodle is an online marketplace based out of San Mateo, California. It was founded in 2004 by ex- Excite executives Craig Donato, Scott Kister and Faith Sedlin.
Overview
Oodle is a classifieds aggregator which aggregates listings from sites like ...
because we're problem solving on an unconscious level" and seeking to "create our life without stressing about it".
Doodling is often incorporated into
art therapy
Art therapy is a distinct discipline that incorporates creative methods of expression through visual art media. Art therapy, as a creative arts therapy profession, originated in the fields of art and psychotherapy and may vary in definition. Art ...
, allowing its users to slow down, focus and de-stress.
History

Doodling have been found on multiple archaeological artefacts at different times around the world. Examples include hand and foot prints intentionally left by children 200,000 years ago in Tibet,
first century drawing of stick figures and gladiators in
Pompeii
Pompeii ( ; ) was a city in what is now the municipality of Pompei, near Naples, in the Campania region of Italy. Along with Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Villa Boscoreale, many surrounding villas, the city was buried under of volcanic ash and p ...
,
obscene drawing in the
Sogdian documents from
Dunhuang
Dunhuang () is a county-level city in northwestern Gansu Province, Western China. According to the 2010 Chinese census, the city has a population of 186,027, though 2019 estimates put the city's population at about 191,800. Sachu (Dunhuang) was ...
(9–10th century). A young student named
Onfim
Anthemius (; ), better known by the modern Russian spelling of his name, Onfim (), was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, sometime around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched ...
from 13th century
Novgorod
Veliky Novgorod ( ; , ; ), also known simply as Novgorod (), is the largest city and administrative centre of Novgorod Oblast, Russia. It is one of the oldest cities in Russia, being first mentioned in the 9th century. The city lies along the V ...
left a variety of doodles in his school notes, written on birch bark.
Notable doodlers
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin () was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era.Basker, Michael. Pushkin and Romanticism. In Ferber, Michael, ed., ''A Companion to European Romanticism''. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. He is consid ...
'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
Andrei Yurievich Khrzhanovsky (; born 30 November 1939 in Moscow) is a Soviet and Russian animator, documentary filmmaker, writer and producer known for making art films. He is the father of director Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Married to philologist, e ...
and
Yuriy Norshteyn
Yuri Borisovich Norstein (; born 15 September 1941) is a Soviet and Russian animator best known for his animated shorts ''Hedgehog in the Fog'' and ''Tale of Tales (1979 film), Tale of Tales''. Since 1981, he has been working on a feature film ca ...
in the 1987 film ''My Favorite Time''.
Other notable literary doodlers have included:
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...
;
the poet and physician
John Keats
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tub ...
, who doodled in the margins of his medical notes;
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for '' The Colossus and Other Poems'' (1960), '' Ariel'' (1965), a ...
;
and the Nobel laureate (in literature, 1913) poet
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Thakur (; anglicised as Rabindranath Tagore ; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengalis, Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter of the Bengal Renai ...
, who made numerous doodles in his manuscript.
Mathematician
Stanislaw Ulam Stanislav and variants may refer to:
People
*Stanislav (given name), a Slavic given name with many spelling variations (Stanislaus, Stanislas, Stanisław, etc.)
Places
* Stanislav, Kherson Oblast, a coastal village in Ukraine
* Stanislaus County, ...
developed the
Ulam spiral
The Ulam spiral or prime spiral is a graphical depiction of the set of prime numbers, devised by mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963 and popularized in Martin Gardner's ''Mathematical Games'' column in ''Scientific American'' a short time later ...
for visualization of
prime numbers
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...
while doodling during a boring presentation at a mathematics conference.
Many American Presidents, including
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (, 1743July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father and the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the United States Declaration of Indepe ...
,
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party a ...
, and
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson Clinton (né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American politician and lawyer who was the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, ...
, have been known to doodle during meetings.
A portfolio featuring American Presidents' doodles while in office, including those of
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and ...
,
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), also known as JFK, was the 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the first Roman Catholic and youngest person elected p ...
,
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionar ...
,
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), also known as LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, under whom he had served a ...
,
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until Resignation of Richard Nixon, his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican ...
,
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party a ...
, can be found in ''Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles & Scrawls from the Oval Office'', introductions by Paul Collins and David Greenberg (New York:
Cabinet Books and
Basic Books
Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1950 and located in New York City, now an imprint of Hachette Book Group. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and his ...
, 2006, )
Some doodles and drawings can be found in notebooks of
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested o ...
.
See also
*
Asemic writing
Asemic writing is a wordless open Semantics, semantic form of writing. The word ''asemic'' means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning". With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of ...
*
Automatic writing
Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged sp ...
*
Drolleries
A drollery, often also called a grotesque, is a small decorative image in the margin of an illuminated manuscript, most popular from about 1250 through the 15th century, though found earlier and later. The most common types of drollery images a ...
*
Fidgeting
Fidgeting is the act of moving about restlessly in a way that is not ( socially recognized as) essential to ongoing tasks or events. Fidgeting may involve playing with one's fingers, hair, or personal objects (e.g. glasses, pens or items of clot ...
*
Graffiti
Graffiti (singular ''graffiti'', or ''graffito'' only in graffiti archeology) is writing or drawings made on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written "monikers" to elabor ...
*
Graphology
Graphology is the analysis of handwriting in an attempt to determine the writer's personality traits. Its methods and conclusions are not supported by scientific evidence, and as such it is considered to be a pseudoscience.
Graphology has been ...
*
Marginalia
Marginalia (or apostils) are marks made in the margin (typography), margins of a book or other document. They may be scribbles, comments, gloss (annotation), glosses (annotations), critiques, doodles, drolleries, or illuminated manuscript, ...
*
Memory and retention in learning
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered ...
*
Mr Doodle
Sam Cox (born 1993 or 1994), known professionally as Mr Doodle, is an illustrator and artist from Kent, England. He is known for his "graffiti spaghetti" style, and in 2024 had an exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath.
Biography
Cox is fro ...
*
Recall (memory)
Recall in memory refers to the mental process of retrieving information from the past. Along with encoding (memory), encoding and storage (memory), storage, it is one of the three core processes of memory. There are three main types of recall: fr ...
*
Sketch (drawing)
A sketch (ultimately from Greek language, Greek σχέδιος – ''schedios'', "done extempore") is a rapidly executed freehand drawing that is not usually intended as a fi ...
*
Stick figure
Stick Figure is an American reggae and dub band founded in 2005. The group has released eight full-length albums and one instrumental album (Prince Fatty Presents), all of which were written and produced by frontman and self-taught multi-instr ...
*
Stream of consciousness writing
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. It is usually in the form of an interior monologue which i ...
*
Ulam spiral
The Ulam spiral or prime spiral is a graphical depiction of the set of prime numbers, devised by mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963 and popularized in Martin Gardner's ''Mathematical Games'' column in ''Scientific American'' a short time later ...
References
Further reading
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{{Authority control
Drawing
Graphology
Daydreaming