Think less, draw more. Draw more, think more.
And don’t tell me you can’t draw.
Everyone can hold a stick. And you can write, and that's the same as drawing.
This is not about art (although it could be) but about thought. This simple act fires the brain to imagine, attend, connect and remember.
Forget skill, think about the process of thought. Thinking is exercise. It's a colossal shame that we seem to be losing it.
I was inspired to learn that a grandmaster chess player can burn 6,000 calories in a day.
What drawing does that nothing else does
When you draw, your brain does three things at once.
It makes meaning (what is this thing?)
It builds an image (what does it look like?), and…
It moves the body (how do I make it real?).
Those three networks, semantic, visual and motor, don't work together that often. Drawing unites them—a kind of miraculous workout for your head.
Which is why it’s so potent.
Without getting too academic, the brain lights up across regions for planning, coordination, and imagination. It’s literally ‘whole-brain thinking’.
Think about it this way.
Drawing doubles the memory. We recall almost twice as much when we draw instead of write. It encodes meaning, image and movement in one hit. No talent required, stick figures still work.
Doodling keeps you awake. Doodlers remember a third more detail from dull tasks. A simple pen stroke keeps the mind anchored and alert.
Drawing rewires creativity. Doing some sketching reshapes the brain’s imagination and control networks. You literally start to think differently.
Sketching makes thought visible. Talking hides assumptions, writing fixes them, but drawing exposes them and fast. And writing is also a form of drawing.
You don’t draw what you see. You draw what you understand. Every line is a small act of clarity.
The coming crisis of imagination
Here’s the problem.
We’re outsourcing more and more of our thinking (writing/drawing) to machines. Machines never pick up a pencil, and they don't think.
They may simulate thinking, but there is no emotion or consciousness, and it's very easy to see the result.
AI finishes our sentences, generates our slides, and even sketches our diagrams. It’s impressive at one level, deeply anaemic at another, and at scale quietly corrosive.
As we let machines produce the output, we lose the exercise, and the work shows it. I can spot an AI slide/article from a hundred paces.
We stop exercising our imagination, and that muscle atrophies fast.
Drawing, however crude, is resistance training for the mind. It keeps our spatial, sensory and semantic systems healthy.
If we give that up, we become editors of others’ ideas rather than originators of our own.
Retaining our edge
Typing is linear. Drawing is spatial, and where ideas collide, overlap and evolve.
One captures what we already know. The other reveals what we don’t yet.
That’s why, in this bewildering age of ‘generated everything’ drawing might be one of the few unautomatable acts left.
A simple line, drawn by hand, is an act of cognition, not computation. So pick up something that leaves a mark.
