← Notes from Nici
Reality check19 Aug 2026· 4 min read

a letter to our fellow doodlers

for years someone told you that you weren't listening. the best-known study on it found the doodlers remembered more. what that does and doesn't prove.

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for a long time, someone told you that you weren't listening.

a teacher, probably, first. then a manager. maybe a partner. the pen was moving, so you must have been somewhere else. put it down. look at me. concentrate.

here's the cost of that: most of us believed them. we didn't just stop doodling in the meeting. we filed it away as evidence — one more small proof that we are the sort of person who can't pay attention properly. that goes in deep, and it stays.

so this is a letter to say it was wrong. not kindly wrong. factually wrong.

the study

in 2009, Jackie Andrade at the University of Plymouth ran a simple experiment. forty people listened to a deliberately boring recorded phone message and had to note down who was coming to a party. half of them were also given printed shapes to shade in while they listened.

afterwards, everyone got a surprise memory test.

the shaders recalled 29% more.

read that again, because it is the opposite of what you were told. the people who looked distracted retained more than the people who looked attentive.

Andrade's explanation is not that doodling is magic. it's that a bored brain does not sit patiently and wait. it leaves. it goes to what's for tea, or the thing you said in 2004. shading shapes takes up just enough attention to stop the drifting, but not so much that it competes with the listening.

scrolling your phone is a different animal entirely. that's a whole second task pulling the other way. the doodle doesn't compete. that's the whole point of it.

and then there's movement

a separate line of research looked at fidgeting rather than drawing.

Sarver, Rapport and colleagues worked with boys aged eight to twelve — 29 with ADHD, 23 without. they found that higher rates of movement went with better working memory scores in the children with ADHD, and slightly worse scores in the children without it. same room, same task, opposite result.

their reading is that the movement keeps alertness up while the brain is being asked to hold and juggle things.

Julie Schweitzer's team at UC Davis have since reported similar patterns in adults. their name for the small unconscious stuff — tapping, twirling, rocking, doodling — is intrinsic fidgeting. their finding is that it is associated with better attention, not worse.

what this isn't

these are small studies. mostly in labs. mostly with children. i'm not going to tell you a biro fixes a bad day at work, because it doesn't.

and the doodling evidence doesn't all point one way. Boggs and colleagues (2017) found the benefit held only for structured doodling — shading shapes, the thing Andrade actually tested. free drawing made recall worse. a 2024 University of Guelph study found no benefit from doodling or fidgeting at all when set against plain note-taking. Andrade's own forty were 35 women and 5 men, which is worth saying out loud given who this letter is addressed to.

so hold it loosely. what the research does do is knock the legs out from under one specific instruction. "stop fidgeting and pay attention" assumes those two things are opposites. for a lot of brains, they aren't. they may be the same thing.

that's a smaller claim than the internet usually makes. it's also the true one, and it's enough.

what i'd do with it

stop hiding it. keep a plain pad next to you. let the pen move while you listen. if someone asks, the honest answer is that it helps you hold on to what's being said. that's not an excuse. it's a working method.

use it for the gap. the hard part of a task switch isn't the new task, it's the switch. three minutes of doodling between two different jobs beats trying to change gear cold.

read the increase. more movement than usual usually means the thing got heavier, or you've been at it too long. that's information about the task. it is not information about your character.

the last bit

i think about the men in particular here. diagnosed at forty-five, if at all. thirty years of being the one who couldn't sit still, who was told off in assembly, who learned to keep the hands under the table in meetings. nobody ever came back and said: actually, that was your brain doing its job.

so, late, and from someone you've never met: that.

your hands were never the problem.

sources

notice

sunday, 8am. two minutes. something i noticed in a classroom, the number underneath it, and one line you can use in monday’s slt meeting. written for people who don’t have time to read it twice.

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