Doing doodles

Wikipedia carries an article about doodling and Sunni Brown gave a TED talk on the subject. The word has been around for some time and it’s meaning has changed. It is presently viewed as a good thing in that it puts the brain in a frame of mind for learning.

I am presently sitting on a pile of over 800, self-made, b/w, A4 doodles. I have thought about categories several times but have failed to get beyond the most elementary of systems. If they have a message I am not aware of it.

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Faces – single, groups, large and small, with happy and unhappy expressions

Bodies - single, groups, large and small – some in boxes

Landscapes – clouds, hills, trees

Abstract

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It takes about 30 minutes for a doodle to complete itself. The monkey mind settles for a snooze. Self-consciousness evaporates. There is no doer but naught is left undone. There are patterns and sometimes the presumption of an agent but they are in the unconscious where inputs and memories are churned to generate reactions and responses regarding feeding, fighting and fornication and other assorted basic needs.

I have five sizes of black pens. The first act is to use one of them to divide the page into sections. The first strokes determine which category the doodle will belong to. Thereafter new lines are added and large areas are filled with patterns.

Children have been keen to colour in pictures for a long time and there is presently a craze for it amongst grown ups. The stone age, cave paintings in Lascaux and elsewhere might be early examples of an ongoing, cultural habit. But what purpose do they serve?

We have an inbuilt capacity to notice faces which are made up of two circles for the eyes with a squiggle beneath which points up or down to express happy or sad.

In 1951 Niko Tinbergen published “The study of instinct” and in 1953 “Social behaviour in animals.” These Zoology classics popularised the notions of ‘supernormal sign stimulus’ and of ‘innate releasing mechanisms’. A famous example is the herring gull chick begging response. It looks like the chicks are responding gleefully to their parent’s arrival with food. But what they are actually responding to is a red spot on a yellow background as seen on a parent’s beak. Larger than life models of the pattern drive the chicks into a frenzy.

Objectively it is to be noticed that work gets done eg doodles get drawn and stories get told. This can happen either egoically or non-egoically.

In the egoic state the focus is with the monkey mind which drifts here and there into the past and future.

In the non egoic state the focus is with the task at hand in the present moment. The unconscious is active in shaping the thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) to react and respond to changes in the physical and cultural environments. An example in humans are the emoticons used in social media to trigger a wide range of emotions using a very small range of super-normal stimuli.

This story began with a vague intention to ‘explain’ the ‘purpose’ and ‘meaning’ of the doodles.  I failed. But this is not a serious problem because I value the process of doing doodles. Doodling is invariably non-egoic and thus out of time and space and therefore peaceful. I suppose that the unconscious is sorting itself out in the background. When doing doodles it is easy to be relaxed and lost into the Oneness of it all.