For Queen Victoria, it was donkeys. For Winston Churchill, it was airplanes. For Leonardo Da Vinci, it was everything from crude drawings to the first working of his ground-breaking laws of frictions. Throughout history, humans- whether royal or bored office worker - have doodled.

Usually relegated to the margins of notebooks or the back of envelopes, the doodle is often considered something messy, throwaway, and unconsidered. If life is what happens when you're making other plans, then doodles are the result of your mind being somewhere else - a phone call, a meeting, a daydream. Yet, in those scrawls - be it shapes, animals, lines, names - can be something powerful, with what they reveal and how they allow us to express our creativity. Hence why a new art project is taking doodles out of the margins and placing them center-stage.

Prize winning artist Oscar Murillo, collects together 40,000 canvases, that have been marked, scribbled and drawn by more than 100,000 children from around the world. Since 2013, Murillo has sent blank canvases to over 300 schools in more than 30 countries. The aim is the capture " the conscious and unconscious energy of young minds at their most absorbent, optimistic and conflicted" and the results are currently on show for the first time in their entirety in Murillo's former school in East London.

In the dictionary, a doodle is defined as an "aimless or casual scribble, design or sketch" or a " minor work". Yet these casual scribbles are something humans have been doing for thousands of years - at least 73,000, in fact, with the first human drawing believed to be a Stone age crayon doodle in a South African cave.

Dutch scholar, Erik Kwakkel, has studied some of the oldest doodles on paper, finding comical faces, caricatures, and geometrical shapes in the margins of Medieval manuscripts. "Anything that humans have been doing from antiquity onwards, there's something powerful going on," says Sunni Brown, author of The Doodle Revolution. "This behavior is universal, it's across cultures and across economic groups. It's like breathing or singing or dancing and is natural to human beings."

Doodling has been shown to reduce stress, improve short term memory and feel rewarding. "Doodling has this liberating quality for many people," says Brown. "It's a spontaneous act of just letting yourself be who you are." But perhaps one of its biggest functions is as a way to unlock unconscious creativity. "You're not prescribing the outcome and you're not striving for a goal; you're just allowing and inviting the mind to shift into a different modality and that is a very sweet spot for getting unconscious information to become available."

BBC (2021)