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.)
