Overcome your memory loss by doodling!

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: Are you tired of your bad memory and struggling hard to remember things? Instead of taking memory enhacing pills simple try to doodle or draw things you want to recall, suggests researchers.

According to the researchers of Waterloo University, drawing pictures of objects or things that we need to remember is an effective way to boost our memory. So, drawing is a better option than writing as it creats a more cohesive memory trace that stimulates as well as integrates visual, motor and sematic information.

The study, published in Quaterly journal of Experimental Psychology, explains that drawing enhances memory performances by creating mental images of the objects depicted by words.

They also clarified that this simple yet effective memory boost technique could help everypone regardless of their artistic talent.

For this study, a group of student participants were given a list of simple and easy-to-draw words such as apple.

The students were given 40 seconds to either draw the word or write it out repeatedly.

They were then given a filler task of classifying musical tones to facilitate the retention process.

Finally, the researchers asked students to freely recall as many words as possible from the initial list in just 60 seconds.

"We discovered a significant recall advantage for words that were drawn as compared to those that were written," said Jeffrey Wammes, the lead author of the study.

The team is currently trying to figure out why this memory benefit is so potent, and how widely it can be applied to other types of information.