Have you ever drawn pictures on your notebooks when you are siting in class? If so, your teacher might have told you to stop. Many people think doodling (胡写乱画) may stop you paying attention to what you are doing. But it might be just the opposite.

One study shows that doodling may help you remember things you hear. In 2009, researchers asked two groups of people to listen to a phone message. One group was encouraged to doodle, but the other was not. Neither group knew that they would be asked to remember information from the message. But the group that doodled remembered 29% more.

Other people suggest other uses for doodling. Jesse Prinz, a professor who studies doodling, says it can help you think creatively. Walking away from a problem to draw might actually help you solve it. When you come back, you will have a fresh idea and get an answer more quickly.

An author named Sunni Brown wrote a book on doodling. She argues that doodling is a tool that can help people think. She admits that people see doodling as doing nothing but she wants to change that. In fact, she owns a business that helps companies improve management effectiveness through doodling.

Brown believes doodling is helpful because it includes more than one way of learning. You learn in four ways: seeing, hearing, reading and writing. The more ways you use, the better you learn. And when you doodle while listening to a lecture, you are using all four.

You might think that being good at drawing is important for doodling. But if the point of doodling is to help you think, then it does’t matter what the picture looks like. Even if you are not an artist, doodling can help you. So next time you need to focus, pick up a pen and doodle away.

This summer, Guinness World Records chose a big cherry as the heaviest ever recorded. A Carmen cherry, harvested by brothers Giuseppe and Alberto Rosso, clocked up 33 grams with a circumference (周长) of around 5 inches. At their farm, Cascina Canape, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, the Rosso brothers claim to have grown many cherries of similar size over the last few years. But it was only in 2021 that they decided to “get serious” in seeking official recognition for their fruit.

However, this is the second time the world record has been broken for the heaviest cherry in 2021. Another grower, from Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, harvested a cherry this year weighing 26.45 grams. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the record was broken twice in Italy, since the country is Europe’s largest cherry producer. Yet Piedmont, where the latest record was set, is not one of the many Italian regions that grow the most cherries, such as Puglia, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Campania, and Lazio.

Though their farm is only 15 acres, the Rosso brothers grow over 70 types of cherries. Consumers today tend to buy the larger, sweeter fruits, and the winning Carmen variety has both of these characteristics. But to achieve the record size, nothing can be left to chance, “Pruning (修剪) is very important,” explains Alberto. “The main purpose is not to overload the plant with fruits: if there are too many, they may all ripen. But then we would have cherries of smaller dimensions with less sugar in them, because the plant would not be able to feed everyone in the same way.”

Also, one may think that large cherries must grow on very large trees. It’s actually the opposite: many new cherry tree types are only about 13 feet high, yet they are the ones that produce the largest fruits.