"Doodling?" echoed the psychiatrist. "Why that is a slang term we use in psychiatry, to describe the absent-minded scrawls and designs people make while their attention is elsewhere occupied. An overflow of the unconscious mind, we call it. Many famous people are 'doodlers.' Their doodles often are a sign of special ability—"
"Exactly!" snapped Gault. "It shows a special ability to waste time. And Harper has become worse since I hired him to do some of my mathematical work. Some influence in this laboratory—I blush to confess—seems to bring it on. 'Four dimensional doodling' we call it, because, as you saw, he doesn't confine it to the surface of the paper!"
Pillbot looked startled. "By jove," he cried. "I believe you've hit on something new to psychiatry. This young man may have some unknown faculty of mind—an instinctive perception of the fourth dimension. Just as some people have an unerring sense of direction, so perhaps Harper has a sense of—of a fourth direction—the fourth dimension! I should like to examine some of his 'doodles'."
-Graph Waldeyer, The 4-D Doodler
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This notebook page comes from a series of Property Law classes at the University of Virginia. In between writing down what the Professor said, I filled the margins with doodles to focus my attention. It was as if the drawings' and writings' fates were intertwined in that they both grew together and neither could have come about alone. The space between the writing and drawing always seemed to be so particularly full of possibilities and starts that I would seek out classes solely for how conducive the professor's lectures were to my notebook doodling.
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