Drawing Helps Us Learn

Want to learn more effectively? Research is showing you should pick up a pencil. The act of drawing can help our minds work better. In his book, Stick Figures: Drawings as a Human Practice, D.B. Dowd argues that doodling isn’t just for artists; drawing should be viewed as a vehicle for development. “We have misfiled the significance of drawing because we see it as a professional skill instead of a personal capacity,” he writes. “This essential confusion has stunted our understanding of drawing and kept it from being seen as a tool for learning above all else.” Drawing has a way of disrupting our shortcuts to “instant knowledge” and breaks our habit of Googling everything, he argues. These easy pathways to learning are very limiting, he says, and while they’re convenient, they make our world smaller. “Drawing works in exactly the opposite way: close observation of almost any particular engages the senses and heightens experience, making the world seem bigger, not smaller,” he writes.