Previous idea-catcher and doodling thoughts refined and added to...

Learning Journey

Step 4: musings

By Linda A. J. Johnson

Catch your ideas!

Make the habit of carrying a notebook and writing down

/drawing down the prior knowledge and the new information you gather. 

“Knowledge carefully recorded is knowledge available in time of need.” -Richard G. Scott

“When your heart speaks, take good notes,” –Judith Campbell

“Drawing is putting a line around an idea.” –Henri Matisse

Doodling, according to Sunni Brown, means “to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think.” Also, consider, by Sunni Brown, “People who doodle when exposed to verbal information, retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts. We think doodling is something you do when you lose focus, but it reality, it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus.”

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” –Carl G Jung

“One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you  have no certainty until you try.” –Aristotle

Back to Sunni Brown’s thoughts: “There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions. They are visual, auditory, reading and writing and kinesthetic. (To really learn) we have to engage at least two of these modalities, or one modality with an emotional experience. The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four leaning modalities simultaneously with the possibility of an emotional experience.”

“Your body hears everything your mind

says.” –Naomi Judd

And, finally, “You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting…it will come if it is there and if you will let is come. –Gertrude Stein

It is my belief that the act of catching down your thoughts is the mechanism that stiches new knowledge you acquire to what you already know.

Carry an idea-catcher.