*This morning while I toiled and sweated at gym I listened, as usual to a podcast. It was a short TED-talk by someone called Sunni Brown, and her subject was Doodling. According to Sunni, doodling - the making of spontaneous marks - actually helps us think. Far from being a distraction, or a time-waste it engages several modalities simultaneously (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic etc.) and thus helps us to retain and process information.
She reckons doodling has long been misunderstood and maligned by teachers and employers.
She says that our culture is too intensely focused on verbal and written information, at the cost of our visual literacy and creativity.
A quick look on the web indicates that lots of people agree with her. Someone’s even done some ‘research’ showing that doodling helps people to stay attentive in boring meetings.
Which made me think of another TED talk I heard a while back - Temple Grandin talking about being a visual thinker. I think my son is a visual thinker, so I’ve been reading up on it a bit . Seems some of us think - and learn - primarily in pictures, not words. These ’visual-spatial’ learners are often highly creative big-picture thinkers, but may have difficulty with the lineal, verbal way in which most school subjects are taught.
Which made me think about how different we all are ( while being deep down the same) in so many ways...
Which made me think of Dr Gary Ghapman’s “Five Languages of Love” and how we all communicate differently too. He claims that couples, especially, can avoid a lot of conflict if they understand this. Some of us express our love with words - and feel most loved when we hear the right words, but for others what matters most is the receiving of gifts, or touch, hugs and sex.
Still others express their love ( and like to receive it) primarily as acts of service and caring - wash the dishes, cook the dinner, put out the rubbish. And for some of us the most nurturing experience is spending ‘quality time’, eye-contact, a sense of deep connection...
All of which is my mental doodle for today.
*This is the much doodled-upon blotter that was on F’s desk at school last year.
1 comment:
Funny, I didn't know the word, but I've been a compulsive doodler all my life, still am! And then, I'm learning some German and coloring words according to their genre - masculine, feminine, and neuter - helps me to remember their genre. Is that a way of showing my love of words too? :-)
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