There is a moment in certain meetings when the pen seems to develop a life of its own. Someone is explaining a timeline. The timeline has somehow produced another timeline. Your notebook now contains three loops, a suspiciously elaborate cube, and what may be the beginning of a small mountain range.
The obvious interpretation is that you have stopped paying attention.
I am not convinced it is always that simple.
Research on doodling is more mixed than the cheerful claim that scribbling automatically "boosts your brain." In some circumstances, a simple doodling task has been associated with better recall. In others, doodling did nothing useful for attention or memory, while conventional note-taking performed better. The more interesting answer, then, is that doodling may help depending on what you are drawing, what you are listening to, and what your brain needs to accomplish at that particular moment.
That is a considerably less marketable answer. It is also a more useful one.
The Famous 29% Finding Needs Some Context
A lot of modern enthusiasm about doodling traces back to psychologist Jackie Andrade's small but intriguing experiment.
Forty participants listened to a deliberately monotonous recorded telephone message containing names of people attending a party. Half were asked to shade printed shapes while listening. The others simply listened. Afterward, participants were unexpectedly tested on what they remembered.
The doodling group performed better on the monitoring task and recalled 29% more information on the surprise memory test, according to the original study on doodling and recall.
That finding is genuinely interesting. It is also easy to inflate into something the study never demonstrated.
The participants were not freehand sketching elaborate dragons through a strategic planning meeting. They were shading predetermined shapes during a monotonous audio task. There were only 40 participants. And although Andrade suggested doodling might help by reducing daydreaming, the experiment did not directly prove that mechanism.
So I would not translate the result into "doodling makes you 29% smarter," because that sentence has already put on running shoes and sprinted far beyond the evidence.
What the study gives us is a narrower possibility: when a task is dull enough that attention is likely to wander, a very simple secondary activity might, under certain conditions, help keep enough attention attached to the primary task.
A doodle can be a small anchor for attention, but it is not a universal concentration hack.
That distinction matters enormously in meetings because meetings are not all cognitively identical.
Listening to a familiar weekly status update is one thing. Reviewing unfamiliar financial projections, negotiating responsibilities, absorbing compliance instructions, or trying to catch a subtle disagreement between three departments is another.
A brain strategy that works during one may be a terrible idea during the other.
Then Newer Research Complicated the Story
This is where I think doodling becomes more interesting, not less.
A much larger study published in 2024 tested the appealing theory that doodling reduces boredom, mind-wandering, and lapses in attention. Across two experiments involving 222 participants, researchers compared conditions including structured doodling, unstructured doodling, listening alone, and note-taking.
They did not find that doodling reliably reduced boredom or mind-wandering, improved task-focused attention, or increased retention. During the longer lecture experiment, participants who concentrated on note-taking showed the highest attention and test performance.
In other words, the tidy story broke.
That is normal science.
One experiment suggests an effect. Later researchers test it under different conditions, with different tasks and larger samples. Sometimes the effect becomes stronger. Sometimes it disappears. Sometimes everyone discovers that the original question was hiding three different questions underneath it.
For an actual person sitting in a Tuesday meeting, the practical takeaway is refreshingly uncomplicated: doodling is not automatically helping merely because your hand is moving.
Sometimes you may be lightly occupied enough to keep listening.
Sometimes you may simply be decorating the minutes while mentally planning dinner.
There is no need to turn either possibility into a personality flaw.
Doodling and Drawing Are Not the Same Mental Task
Another source of confusion is that research on drawing sometimes gets folded into discussions of doodling as though the two activities were interchangeable.
They are not.
Suppose your manager says, "The customer goes from the website to the sales team, then through approval, then into onboarding."
If you sketch boxes and arrows representing that process, your drawing is directly related to the information you are trying to understand.
Now suppose your manager says the same thing while you draw seventeen progressively smaller circles around the word "lunch."
Both involve a pen. Cognitively, they may be doing rather different jobs.
Research from the University of Waterloo found a reliable "drawing effect" in a series of memory experiments. Participants who drew pictures representing words they were trying to remember later recalled those words better than participants who repeatedly wrote them. Researchers proposed that the benefit may come partly from combining visual, motor, and semantic processing during drawing for memory.
That does not mean unrelated doodling inherits the same memory advantage.
If anything, it gives us a more practical workplace idea: when the information itself can be visualized, sketching the concept may be more useful than drawing beside it.
You do not need artistic ability.
A process can be boxes and arrows. A hierarchy can be circles. A product idea can be an ugly rectangle with a button in roughly the correct hemisphere.
The sketch is working if it helps you think, not if someone would frame it.
Drawing the thing you need to remember is not the same as drawing a tiny spiral while someone explains quarterly revenue.
Your Doodles Probably Do Not Reveal Your Secret Personality
This is the part of doodle psychology I would happily retire.
Search around long enough and you will encounter wonderfully confident interpretations:
Squares mean you crave control.
Circles mean you seek harmony.
Flowers reveal sensitivity.
Stars indicate ambition.
Eyes suggest introspection.
And presumably drawing a cube means your subconscious desperately wants better storage.
These explanations are fun in the way horoscopes are fun. They can prompt reflection. They can occasionally feel eerily accurate. But they should not be presented as established psychological conclusions.
Even formal projective drawing techniques used in psychological assessment have faced substantial questions about reliability and validity. A major review of projective methods found particularly limited evidence for many interpretations based on human figure drawings, which is a much more structured context than absent-minded meeting doodles. That should make us appropriately cautious about assigning fixed psychological meanings to a triangle someone drew during a procurement update.
A doodle may reflect what was easiest for your hand to repeat.
It may come from the logo on somebody's slide.
You may draw flowers because you know how to draw flowers.
You may draw boxes because boxes are approximately the limits of your artistic repertoire.
That explanation is admittedly less mysterious, but it has the considerable advantage of not pretending a notebook margin is a clinical assessment.
The Better Question Is Whether the Doodle Fits the Meeting
Imagine a fairly ordinary scenario.
You are in a recurring 50-minute team meeting. The first twenty minutes consist mostly of updates you need to hear but do not need to document word for word. You find that making small repetitive shapes keeps your hands occupied without preventing you from following the conversation.
Then the meeting shifts.
A deadline changes. Three responsibilities move between people. Someone mentions a number you will need later.
That is the point to stop letting the pen freestyle and start taking actual notes.
This is the approach I find more sensible than asking whether doodling is "good" or "bad" for the brain. Treat it as a tool whose usefulness changes with the task.
Doodling is probably a poor fit when you need to:
- record names, dates, prices, deadlines, or action items accurately;
- compare numbers or detailed information on a screen;
- participate actively in rapid discussion;
- notice visual details in a demonstration;
- take formal meeting minutes;
- lead the meeting or monitor other people's reactions closely.
It may be less intrusive during a long stretch of passive listening, especially if the drawing remains simple enough that you can immediately redirect attention when the conversation becomes important.
My rule of thumb would be this: if you would struggle to summarize the last two minutes, the doodle is no longer helping.
The notebook has won.
There May Be a Calming Side, but Let’s Not Oversell It
People often describe drawing or doodling as soothing, and there is some research suggesting that making art can affect stress.
For example, a Drexel University study involved 39 adults spending 45 minutes making visual art with materials such as markers, clay, and collage supplies. Researchers measured salivary cortisol before and afterward and reported lower levels for most participants following the art-making session.
Interesting? Yes.
Evidence that three minutes of drawing spirals during a budget meeting will lower your stress hormones? No.
Those are very different activities.
The participants had an extended period devoted specifically to making art, rather than creating incidental doodles while simultaneously processing workplace information.
Still, I think there is room for a modest observation here. Repetitive pen movement may feel calming or grounding for some people. If that happens without interfering with attention, there is nothing inherently frivolous about it.
Not every useful workplace habit needs to look visibly industrious.
Sometimes thinking looks like writing.
Sometimes it looks like staring at the ceiling for fifteen seconds.
Sometimes it looks like drawing an alarmingly detailed row of tiny houses while still knowing exactly who owns Friday's deliverable.
Meeting Etiquette Is Part of the Equation Too
There is another problem the laboratory cannot solve for you: other people.
You may genuinely listen better while doodling, but the person across the table may interpret looking down and drawing as disengagement.
That perception may be unfair. It may also matter.
Context helps.
During an informal internal meeting where everyone knows one another, nobody may care. During a client presentation, job interview, performance discussion, or important conversation with a manager, visible doodling could send a message you never intended.
This is especially worth considering if you are the person leading the meeting. There is a difference between using doodling privately as an attention aid and appearing absorbed in your sketch while someone else is explaining a problem.
If visual thinking genuinely helps you, make it legible as thinking when appropriate. Sketch the process being discussed. Write keywords beside the shapes. Capture decisions. Turn the page toward the conversation rather than away from it.
That way your notebook looks less like an escape hatch and more like part of the work.
The most useful question is not what your doodle means about you, but whether it helped you stay present for what mattered.
Try a One-Meeting Experiment
Rather than deciding that you are officially "a doodler" or "not a doodler," I would test the habit.
Pick two similar recurring meetings.
During one, allow yourself uncomplicated doodling while listening. Keep it deliberately low-effort. No detailed illustration. No shading project requiring artistic closure.
After the meeting, without looking at your notes, ask yourself:
- What were the three main points?
- Did any decisions change?
- What am I responsible for next?
- Which details do I need to verify?
- Can I explain the meeting to someone who was not there?
During the second meeting, use conventional note-taking instead.
Compare what you retained and how attentive you felt.
This is hardly a controlled psychology experiment, but it answers the question that matters in everyday life: what helps you function better in the meetings you actually attend?
You may discover that doodling works beautifully during passive listening but becomes distracting during complicated discussion.
You may discover that drawing concepts is useful while unrelated doodling is not.
You may discover that plain old notes win by a mile.
Or you may discover the problem was never doodling. The problem was a 75-minute meeting that should have been an eight-line email.
Science cannot rescue every calendar invitation.
What We Learned (or Didn’t)
What We Learned:
- A small early study found better recall during a specific structured doodling task, but later research has not shown doodling to be a reliable attention or memory booster in every setting.
- Drawing information you are actively trying to understand is different from doodling unrelated shapes beside it, and the distinction matters more than most "doodling is good for your brain" headlines suggest.
- The most practical test is functional: if you can follow the discussion, capture important details, and redirect attention instantly when needed, a little scribbling may be perfectly compatible with listening.
What We Didn’t:
- Why one meeting produces three modest circles while another somehow results in a complete architectural plan for a village that does not exist.
- At what slide number the human hand officially decides it has heard enough about "strategic alignment" and begins drawing leaves.
- Whether a page full of boxes indicates a deep need for structure or simply proves that boxes are among the few things most adults can draw without emotional preparation.
Keep the Pen, Lose the Mythology
So, is doodling during meetings good for your brain?
Sometimes it may help. Sometimes it may be neutral. Sometimes it may compete with the very information you are supposed to be absorbing.
I think that uncertainty is more useful than pretending a universal brain hack has been hiding inside our notebooks all along.
Doodle if it helps you listen. Sketch the actual idea when visual thinking helps you understand it. Take proper notes when details matter. And if your mind has completely left the room while your pen develops an eight-panel comic about the meeting, perhaps believe the evidence in front of you.
The doodle is not necessarily the problem.
But it may be trying to tell you the meeting has one.
