Did your boss ever catch you covering an important memo with Escher-like scribbles? In high school, did your teacher call you out for drawing on the desk, your sneakers, your skin? Today, the doodle nay-sayers are being drowned out by a growing body of research and opinion that indicates that connects that seemingly distracted scribbling with greater info retention and creativity. Companies like Dell, and Zappos, and Disney are eager for employees to doodle on the job–they even pay consultants to help them.

“I can’t tell you how important it is to draw,” says Sunni Brown, whose creative consultancy Sunni Brown Ink, teaches “applied visual thinking”– a.k.a doodling–to coders, designers, and even journalists. “It gets the neurons to fire and expands the mind.” Just why and how this happens is the topic of Brown’s recent book, The Doodle Revolution. Here, she shares her doodling “dos.”

Why Doodle

Studies have shown that doodling can free up short- and long-term memory, improve content retention and increase attention span. It can also produce creative insight, because “when the mind starts to engage with visual language, you get neurological access that you don’t have when you’re in a linguistic mode,” says Brown. Most of us use reading, writing, and talking to brainstorm, but “the human mind is very habit forming,” she says. To break that habit, you have to think in an unfamiliar medium–a visual medium.

What To Doodle

These Brown-recommended doodling exercises will help you rethink the familiar and make unexpected connections.

“Atomization.” Take an object and visually break it down into its tiniest parts. If you start with the word “racoon,” you might draw claws, a robber’s mask and a trash can. As Brown says, “any element of a raccoon–its body or environment–becomes a way of looking at the animal that you didn’t think about” when you considered it as a whole.

“Game-Storming.” Take two unrelated things, like elephants and ice cream, and draw them in their atomized parts. Then create drawings that randomly fuse these parts together. Like trunk-cones or melting ears. Brown has used this technique to help journalists think up unique story angles.

“Process Map.” Having trouble thinking through a problem? Create a visual display that illustrates (literally) the sequence of events. Brown calls this a “cause and effect doodle.” Sometimes, looking at pictures can help your brain make sense of a complex system better than words.