Want your words to be remembered? Draw them!

Image from the study. You remember a lion better if you draw it

My friend Doug Hensch shared a recent scientific study on drawing’s effects on memory (You can check out Doug’s podcast Looking For AND and the new book Re-Thinking Humility.)

Published in the journal Cognition, the study, Drawing improves memory: The importance of multimodal encoding by Jeffrey D. Wammes, Tanya R. Jonker, Myra A. Fernandes, found that:

• Drawing outperforms writing, tracing, imagining, viewing, or writing about a concept as a means to remember it.

• Drawing’s effect on encoding (actively committing an idea to memory and ease if later recall) was significantly greater than prior studies indicated.

• “…the dynamic interplay between one’s elaborative internal process and the actual drawing on the page dictates what is held in memory.” In other words, drawing clarifies one’s mental model of a concept; it externalizes the internal work of the mind and makes it more concrete.

• Drawing is itself multimodal, presenting information in three ways: elaborative (internally visualizing a concept), motoric (translating an internal image to paper), and pictorial (viewing an image.) The more information modalities employed, the better the understanding and retention.

• Drawing enhances both long-term and short-term memory.

• Drawing can be applied to boost memory in education and aging populations.

• Drawing a concept resulted in 91% accuracy in recall (vs. 65% imagining the concept, 61% viewing the concept, or 53% writing about the concept.)