This is reassuring.  As a sufferer of explosive, projectile ADD, I often find class and meetings to be excruciating.  I try hard not to be insulting about it.  But I’m driven to doodle.  Alot.  I doze off, too; sometimes while doodling.  One time in an Econ class in college, I literally fell asleep, as in I fell out of my chair onto the floor(…oops).  But now I know that all along, it’s actually because I was paying attention even better than all those chumps who were attentively taking notes.

The doodlers creamed the nondoodlers: those who doodled during the tape recalled 7.5 pieces of information (out of 16 total) on average, 29% more than the average of 5.8 recalled by the control group.

QED. All I need now is a study proving that people who write blog posts at work are 29% more productive than those who don’t.

Why does doodling aid memory? Andrade offers several theories, but the most persuasive is that when you doodle, you don’t daydream. Daydreaming may seem absentminded and pointless, but it actually demands a lot of the brain’s processing power. You start daydreaming about a vacation, which leads you to think about potential destinations, how you would pay for the trip, whether you could get the flight upgraded, how you might score a bigger hotel room. These cognitions require what psychologists call “executive functioning” — for example, planning for the future and comparing costs and benefits.

Huh.  So daydreaming = bad, but doodling = good.  Maybe I’m not so good at paying attention after all.  I didn’t actually get all the way to the end of the article, but I recommend that you do.