Pattern Drawing and the Brain: What EEG Studies of Zentangle Show

Pattern drawing and pattern coloring are fixtures of activity calendars. Families, surveyors and boards increasingly ask whether they “work”, and the claims made online range from reasonable (it is calming) to overstated (it “rewires the brain”). This summary separates what has been measured from what has been assumed.

The Zentangle Method is a structured way of drawing: small repeated patterns, drawn in pen one stroke at a time inside a small tile, taught as a relaxed and focused practice. Cognicopia’s pattern and botanical pages borrow the principle (repeated, predictable shapes inside clear boundaries) for coloring. They are not the Zentangle Method itself, and they have not been studied directly.

An EEG records the brain’s electrical rhythms from the scalp. The alpha rhythm, roughly 8 to 12 cycles a second, is prominent when a person is awake and relaxed, and it also shifts with attention and visual processing. Other bands (delta, theta, beta, gamma) have their own associations, and all of them vary with the task, the person and the recording.

The most useful comparison is meditation. A systematic review of 56 EEG studies of mindfulness, with 1,715 participants, found mindfulness most often associated with higher alpha and theta power, although not every study found it.⁸

An earlier study measured alpha activity before and after 20 minutes of drawing with oil pastels in 10 adults (6 artists and 4 non-artists) and found alpha differences in several brain regions after drawing.⁹

Read together, these studies describe a brain that is engaged and focused while drawing patterns, in a way that resembles mindfulness practice. That is a plausible basis for the calm many facilitators observe. It is not evidence that pattern drawing improves cognition, and none of it was measured in people living with dementia.

• Cortisol: 39 healthy adults aged 18 to 59 spent 45 minutes making art with an art therapist. Cortisol, a stress hormone, fell significantly afterward, in about three quarters of participants, whatever their experience with art.¹⁰
• Reward: brain imaging (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) during 3 minutes each of coloring, doodling and free drawing showed all three activating the brain’s reward pathway compared with rest, doodling the most.¹¹
• Anxiety: after an anxiety-raising task, 84 students colored a mandala, a plaid pattern or a blank page. Anxiety fell about equally for the mandala and plaid groups, and more than for the blank page.⁵
• A meta-analysis of 8 studies (578 participants) found mandala coloring and free drawing equally effective for anxiety in the moment, and found signs that small studies overstate the effect.⁶

A 2024 review of art therapy and neuroscience describes the evidence, its limits and the myths that have grown around it, and notes that how art therapy works is still poorly understood.¹²

A pilot randomized trial in adults from the general population found less negative feeling after Zentangle classes than on a waitlist, both straight after and two weeks later.¹³ A workplace program for 40 rural healthcare workers reported less work stress and frustration.¹⁴

The 2018 Cochrane review of art therapy for people with dementia found two studies with 60 participants analyzed, out of 88 randomized, and concluded that there is insufficient evidence about its efficacy.⁷

Since then, a randomized trial of a creative arts and storytelling program for 78 people with mild to moderate dementia and their caregivers found fewer behavioral and psychological symptoms, better communication and quality of life, and less caregiver distress and burden than a social-contact comparison, lasting at least 24 weeks.¹⁵ It was not a pattern-drawing program.