Attention artists: the new key to remembering things might be your drawing pencil
With the increased popularity of coloring books for adults, we’ve all been busting out the colored pencils and getting our inner artist out. Now, there’s new science that suggests your artistic talents could help improve your memory.
A new study suggests that if you want to remember something, you should draw it.
According to Huffington Post, the study by Jeffrey Wammes and his team at the University of Waterloo in Canada shows promising data that the act of drawing might help embed information into your memory. So, when you need to remember something on your to-do list try drawing it.
The study actually sounds like a fun game of Pictionary.
The study gave a group of participants 40 easy-to-visualize words, like “apple.” Half the group wrote the word over and over, and the other half drew it for 40 seconds. Once they had gone through all 40 words, the subjects were given a filler task to help get their mind off of the project. Then, they were tested to see how many of the words they remembered.
The results showed that the people who drew the words remembered more than the people who wrote out the words.
The reason might be because drawing is a complex exercise for your brain, and the more complex the process of trying to remember something, the more likely you are to remember it.
