doodles

Do you doodle? Many people love to scribble away absent-mindedly, and often these doodles can carry a great deal of meaning, and for the artist, can sometimes be the source of inspiration for serious artworks. This article looks at why people doodle and what doodles might mean. Click through to page 2 for an index of doodle symbols, to find out what your scribbles mean.

Why do we doodle?
Often, its just boredom. People are not wired for doing nothing. with a long prehistory of precarious existence, people need to be constantly engaged in productive action. Laziness is a sure recipe for extinction. Neither are we wired for the purely cerebral activity that so many of us are now employed in. we are designed to work with our hands, to scan the horizon with our eyes, and walk long miles. So, we fidget, twitch, fiddle and doodle whenever we are forced to sit still and inactive for any period of time.

Doodling is also an outlet for frustrated artistic expression. The arts in our society have become 'spectator sports' reserved for the talented, while the rest of us are too embarrassed to sing (except in the shower), dance (except for some foot-tapping) or draw (except for doodling). These fundamental outlets for creative expression have been stymied by a combination of social pressure (fear of inadequacy) and lack of training (our overfull school curriculums leaving little room for the arts, combined with a flawed view of artistic development as innate and not to be 'messed with' by education).

When we are otherwise occupied - on the phone, in a meeting or lecture, writing a list - basically, any moderately engaging mental activity with a pen in our hand the censor in our head can be turned off, and we allow ourselves to express the ideas that are locked in our head. Usually we have a limited visual vocabulary that we have at our disposal; depending on the age at which our artistic development stalled. Children learn a set of formal symbols: the face, house, sun, moon, flower, tree, bird, fish, and basic geometric shapes that are established in early primary school. They might add more complex forms later, but rarely learn observational drawing. In the early teens, when realistic expression and detail become important, children keenly feel an inadequacy in their ability to draw realistically, and stop drawing. People who stopped drawing very early will tend to limit their doodles to repetitive geometric forms and the learned symbols from their childhood. Those that continued drawing in their teens will include more involved patterns and complex symbolic representations, while people who maintained an interest in creative expression may create intricate doodles and complete drawings.

Go to page 2 to find out what your doodles mean.

Acknowledgment: The development of these pages was kicked off by the excellent resource on doodling at AnnaKoren.com, and while supplemented by personal research and a vast array of sources, I remain indebted to Anna Koren for much essential information.

Disclaimer: This information is offered for your amusement only, and is not to be used for psychological assessment in any form. Please, see your health professional if you have any questions or concerns about mental health. Personality testing of any form requires extensive training and should be carried out by experts.