You’re on a call with a friend, drawing spirals on the back of an envelope. You’re in a meeting, outlining and filling in squares on a notepad.
You’re on hold with the doctor’s office, and by the time someone picks up, you’ve covered half a page in shapes you’ll never look at again.
If you’ve ever been the doodler in a meeting, you’ve probably caught the look. The glance down at your notepad. The pause from whoever’s presenting, as if they’re deciding whether to say something.
The assumption is clear: you’re not paying attention, and the pen is the proof.
But something about it feels right. You’re not drawing instead of listening. You’re drawing because it helps you listen. And the research says you’re not imagining that.
Doodlers remembered 29% more than the people who just sat and listened
Jackie Andrade, a psychologist at the University of Plymouth, wanted to test something that had been assumed for a long time but never checked: does doodling during a task help or hurt your ability to pay attention?
She had 40 people listen to a long, boring voicemail. The message rambled on for two and a half minutes about who was coming to a party, dropping names and places along the way.
Half the group shaded in shapes on a piece of paper while they listened. The other half just sat there.
Nobody was told their memory would be tested.
That detail matters. The doodlers weren’t trying to remember anything. They weren’t using the pen as a study tool.
They were shading in shapes the way you shade in shapes during a call: absently, without purpose, because the pen was there and the call was dull.
When the message ended, Andrade asked both groups to recall the names and places from the call.
The doodlers remembered 29% more than the people who had nothing in their hands. The ones who looked like they were paying attention retained less than the ones who looked distracted.
Your brain is going to wander, and the pen gives it somewhere safe to go
When something is boring, your brain doesn’t just sit there patiently waiting for it to get interesting. It leaves.
It starts thinking about what you’re having for dinner, or the conversation you had yesterday, or the thing you need to do after this meeting. That’s daydreaming, and it pulls you away from whatever you’re supposed to be listening to.
Daydreaming is expensive. Once your brain wanders into a thought with any depth to it, coming back to the meeting or the call takes real effort. You’ve missed a chunk. You’re now trying to catch up while also pretending you didn’t miss anything.
What Andrade thinks doodling does is fill the gap before daydreaming gets the chance. The pen occupies just enough of your brain’s spare capacity to keep it from drifting into a full daydream, but not so much that it competes with listening.
Think of it as giving your brain a small, easy job to do with its free hand while the main job keeps running. The doodling doesn’t take over. It fills the space that boredom would have filled with something much more distracting.
That’s what makes it different from checking your phone. Your phone pulls you into a separate task that competes directly with whatever you’re supposed to be hearing.
Doodling doesn’t compete. It’s simple enough that your brain can do both at once, the way you can fold laundry while talking but can’t write an email while talking.
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Paying attention is work, and the pen lets your brain rest without leaving
There’s another reason the pen helps, and it has nothing to do with preventing daydreaming. Paying attention is work. Real, sustained, hold-your-focus-in-one-place work. And like any work, it tires you out.
You’ve felt this. Forty minutes into a long presentation, you’re not distracted by anything specific. You haven’t started daydreaming. Your brain just fades. The words are still coming in, but you’ve stopped processing them.
You’re staring at the speaker and receiving nothing. That’s not boredom. That’s attention running out of fuel.
Your brain held focus as long as it could, and then it quit. Not because the material got worse, but because holding attention in one place for that long costs energy, and the tank eventually empties.
Doodling seems to slow that drain. The pen gives part of your brain something low-effort to do, which lets the rest of it stay engaged longer.
It’s like shifting your weight from one foot to the other when you’ve been standing a long time. You’re not leaving. You’re redistributing the load so you can stay a little longer.
A study of medical students, who regularly sit through hours of dense material, found the same pattern. Even in a group trained to absorb large amounts of information, brief doodling helped them retain more and gave them a mental reprieve that kept them going.
These weren’t people half-listening to a dull voicemail. They were processing material they’d be tested on, material with real consequences. The fact that doodling still helped in that context suggests the benefit isn’t limited to boring meetings. It works when the content matters, too.
The key was keeping it simple and time-limited. Idle shapes, not detailed drawings.
If you’re drawing a portrait, that’s a different situation
There’s an important distinction buried in Andrade’s study that’s easy to miss. The doodlers in her experiment weren’t drawing anything creative. They were shading in pre-printed shapes. Simple, repetitive, requiring almost no thought.
That matters, because the mechanism only works when the doodling stays low-effort.
A 2024 study from the University of Guelph tried a version of the experiment with more complex material and found that doodling didn’t improve memory at all. Note-taking outperformed it.
When the task being listened to requires more active processing, the brain needs all its resources, and even simple doodling starts to compete.
So there’s a line. Shading shapes, drawing spirals, filling in corners of a margin: that’s the version that helps.
Sketching something elaborate, working on a real drawing, putting creative energy into what’s on the page: that crosses into a secondary task that takes rather than gives.
The doodling that helps is the kind you’d barely call drawing. It’s the mindless version, the pen moving on its own while the rest of you listens.
If you have to think about what you’re doodling, it’s stopped being an anchor and started being a project.
So keep the pen moving
The spirals, the boxes, the little shapes in the margins. They’re doing a job, even if nobody in the meeting can see it. Your hand isn’t wandering. It’s keeping the rest of you in the room.
Next time someone gives you a look for drawing during a conversation, you don’t owe them an apology. The pen was never the problem. It was the solution your brain found before you even knew you needed one.
