Sunday, January 15, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Mind Mapping - who started this and why ?
It’s been called ‘The Swiss Army Knife for the Brain”. It is Mind Mapping.
Mind Maps® were invented by Tony Buzan. Tony was a student at university and wanted to be able to study more effectively, to set out information in a way that was clear and easily recalled.
So he went to the university library to see what books he could find on how the brain works. The librarian showed him where the Medical Section was in the library.
As Tony says, “I wanted to learn how to use my brain, I didn’t want to take it out !”
Tony was curious as to how the brain works and thought that if he could better understand how the brain works, then he should be able to make better use of it himself.
Sounds reasonable. After all, if you want to have your car perform better, then it would be a good idea in the first place to understand just how the car works.
Of course, he’d most likely heard someone say “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But why is that ? Simply, as Tony realised, the brain naturally remembers pictures – it doesn’t remember – easily – pages of written text.
The brain likes colors and codes and icons. Why do companies and organizations have logos ? Because that one single image represents what might take pages to set out in written, linear text. The single image is recognized by the brain – and all that the single image represents is conveyed an instant.
Tony also found that the brain links words or images to other words or images which are related. Ahh …the magic of creativity is sparked – Tony calls this ‘The bloom and flow of association.’
With all this knowledge he was gathering, he developed the concept of Mind Maps.
Since then, Mind Maps have been used by literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide and they’ve been used for personal as well as – significantly - business applications. Well, not all of those are strictly Mind Maps. They may be proto-mind maps or graphical representations of ideas or concepts and even of processes and because they are linked by lines then they’re called mind maps. But that’s not what they are.
Correctly drawn, following the simple but important rules of Mind Mapping will have a powerful effect on your creativity, on your planning and strategizing, it will improve learning skills and will boost your ability to recall information about even the most complex concepts - and so much more.
There are right and wrong ways to draw Mind Maps. Here’s a simple but very important rule to follow to keep it right:
There’s a very good reason for this. Any more than one word limits your creativity and limits the options you’ll be able to include as you extend or add to that branch.
The applications for Mind Maps are limitless - I’ll show you why that is so later.
Mind Maps® were invented by Tony Buzan. Tony was a student at university and wanted to be able to study more effectively, to set out information in a way that was clear and easily recalled.
So he went to the university library to see what books he could find on how the brain works. The librarian showed him where the Medical Section was in the library.
As Tony says, “I wanted to learn how to use my brain, I didn’t want to take it out !”
Tony was curious as to how the brain works and thought that if he could better understand how the brain works, then he should be able to make better use of it himself.
Sounds reasonable. After all, if you want to have your car perform better, then it would be a good idea in the first place to understand just how the car works.
Of course, he’d most likely heard someone say “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But why is that ? Simply, as Tony realised, the brain naturally remembers pictures – it doesn’t remember – easily – pages of written text.
The brain likes colors and codes and icons. Why do companies and organizations have logos ? Because that one single image represents what might take pages to set out in written, linear text. The single image is recognized by the brain – and all that the single image represents is conveyed an instant.
Tony also found that the brain links words or images to other words or images which are related. Ahh …the magic of creativity is sparked – Tony calls this ‘The bloom and flow of association.’
With all this knowledge he was gathering, he developed the concept of Mind Maps.
Since then, Mind Maps have been used by literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide and they’ve been used for personal as well as – significantly - business applications. Well, not all of those are strictly Mind Maps. They may be proto-mind maps or graphical representations of ideas or concepts and even of processes and because they are linked by lines then they’re called mind maps. But that’s not what they are.
Correctly drawn, following the simple but important rules of Mind Mapping will have a powerful effect on your creativity, on your planning and strategizing, it will improve learning skills and will boost your ability to recall information about even the most complex concepts - and so much more.
There are right and wrong ways to draw Mind Maps. Here’s a simple but very important rule to follow to keep it right:
One word per branch (or line) in your Mind Map.
There’s a very good reason for this. Any more than one word limits your creativity and limits the options you’ll be able to include as you extend or add to that branch.
The applications for Mind Maps are limitless - I’ll show you why that is so later.
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