Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde
One of our brain functions is analysing our surrounding, receiving signals, and creating memories. Memory is a 3-step process, including encoding (i.e., receiving signals), storing (i.e., recording a series of signals as an event), and retrieval (i.e., recalling the previously stored event at a later time). Memory is not an absolute process, some things will make it from encoding to storage, some won’t. Some people will be able to recall events or facts easily, some people will struggle. Memory truly is a fascinating topic and we still have a lot to learn about its complexity. What researchers have already found is that there are ways to boost encoding and retrieval of specific (mainly fact-semantic) items… and one of them is drawing.
Art and creativity are good for your brain, creating new connections between different areas in your brains and helping us deal with stress. It releases “feel-good” hormones. Engaging in creative activities is like a workout for your mind: it can be hard at the time, but the benefits are countless. Including when it comes to learning and remembering.
I studied biology, which involved a lot of learning the meaning of complicated words and remembering complex concepts and chains of reactions (for example, the mechanism underlying breathing, the trajectory of a blood cell, or the functioning of a mitochondria). And a lot of drawing. As a biology student, I would always carry around a special pencil case full of coloured pens and felt tips. Not having it with me during a biology lesson was worth than forgetting notes from previous lessons: you can always put your notes together put you couldn’t really understand the complexity of your drawing unless you used colours. And to this day, I can still remember some of the complex systems we learned about by recalling the associated drawings. Isn’t it crazy? Some people might think it is associated with my memory type (I have more a visual than auditive memory), but it turns out it is not the whole story.
A series of research have shown that drawing help the encoding of words or concepts. They asked people to learn words from a list, asking them to either read the words multiple times, write them out multiple times, or draw quick pictures of the words. Guess who performed best at recall? The ones that sketch the words into pictures. Going even further, they showed that drawing also helps understanding and remembering complex concept (such as the functioning of the root system in plants…) as it requires the understanding of the terms and concepts to translate the definition into a new form, a picture. The newly created picture holds the meaning of the concept you are trying to remember. By looking at it, you can make sense of the whole without having to actually remember every single part. When we had exams in biology, almost all of us would start by roughly sketching all the drawings associated with the topics of the exam before starting to write. We would draw our knowledge from the drawings.
And it goes even further. The process of drawing is made out of three main components: physical movements (hand and arm movements associated with making the drawing), personal elaboration (thinking about how to represent the word or concept), and visual feedback (actually seeing what you are drawing). Getting people to simple trace over an existing drawing with their fingertip (visual feedback + physical movements) or to draw something they couldn’t see (physical movement + personal elaboration) already improved memory. Memory by drawing seems thus to be a cumulative process, where adding a component improves the encoding and retrieval of the word or concept, reaching its peak performance when all 3 components were put together (physical movement + personal elaboration + visual feedback).
In biology classes, it wasn’t really about creating the drawing ourselves, but choosing which colour to associate with what and creating our own legend chart that made sense to us personally. It was about copying the existing drawing, creating them as we learned the concepts. As the drawing took form, so did the associated concept in our mind.
Researchers think this is due to the various mental processes involved in drawing that are known to help memory, such as visualisation and elaboration. It is easier to grasp something you can associate with a mental picture, it is easier to remember a concept you have associated with a drawing. Taken together, all the research done so far on this suggest that drawing is a good encoding strategy that can improve memory performance, even in people suffering from memory impairment (old age, dementia…).
Plenty of work remains to be done to fully grasp how drawing helps memory and what are the real-life benefits, but it all point in the same direction: drawing seems to be a great memory tool!
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Some references
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