If You Are Not Using Mind Maps, You Are Not Serious About Improving Your Learning Skill
A Mind Map is a revolutionary thinking tool that, when mastered, will transform your life. Tony Buzan — Mind Map creator
What is your prime language? Please try to think about it ten seconds before answering.
When I first tried to answer that question, the first thing that came to my mind was French, obviously because it is my native language. Most of you probably had the same answer, English, Chinese, German, or whatever language you spoke first in your childhood. But, the answer is wrong.
Your prime language is the human language itself, which is a combination of Association, Imagination and Location.
Are you not convinced? Then, let’s play a little game. I will give you one word, close your eyes and let your brain work. The word is “APPLE”.
Chances are, you imagined an apple, its colour, taste, form and probably the last place you saw it. I guess you didn’t imagine the word apple. Did you?
You see, imagination, association, and location, we are fluent in that language.
Now, are you wondering what your prime language has to do with Mind Map? Well, you can externalise your primary language, and when externalised in its purest form, it creates a Mind Map.
What is a Mind Map?
When I first started using Mind Maps, like most people, I was only using it as a note-taking tool, but with Mind Maps, we can do more than that.
During the last two weeks, as part of the “Month To Master ” challenge by Michael Simmons, I spent 25 hours going deep on Mind Maps, learning how to use them more efficiently for note-taking, memory, revision, etc.
I merely scratched the surface, but enough to realise how powerful and versatile a Mind Map is.
- A Whole-Brain Thinking Tool
A mind map activates your “whole-brain” thinking because it engages the logical left-hand side of your brain and its creative right-hand hemisphere.
By using spatial awareness, imagination, colour, and dimension in your Mind Maps, you activate the right side of your brain.
By using words, connections, numbers, and logic, you activate the left side of your brain.
Your brain is a sleeping giant and Mind Map Mastery can help you wake it up!
2. A combination of powerful ingredients
A mind map contains critical ingredients that help you improve your memory, creativity, learning, and thinking. Those key ingredients are fundamental for the creation of a True Mind Map. Let’s go deep into each of these ingredients.
2.1. Radiant thinking
Do you remember the example of the APPLE before? You demonstrated how your brain offers infinite opportunities for thoughts by reacting to the word APPLE through different associations.
Your thinking is radiant. It has limitless radials, and each radial can subdivide into other infinite radials.
2.2. Non-Linear-Organic Flow
Your brain thinks organically, not in toolbars, menus and lists.
Mind Maps mimic the synapses and connections of our brain cells, therefore reflecting the way we are created and connected.
2.3. Colour
Colours relate to the right side of the brain, therefore stimulating memory and creativity.
Colours capture attention, improve comprehension, ignite motivation, and increase the mental processing and storing of images.
2.4 Images
The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” has been scientifically confirmed by American Psychologist Professor Ralph Haber. In 1970, in his study into image recognition, he found that the average human, when shown 10,000 photographs, can remember more than 98 per cent of them.
A Mind Map is an image itself, which means that according to that study if you make 100 Mind Maps, you will be able to remember almost all of them. Great, right?
2.5 Words
Words are associated with the rational left-hand hemisphere of the brain. When combined with colours, both sides of the brain are engaged.
By adding keywords in your Mind Map, you will give your brain a hook on which to hang a memory.
If till here you are not yet convinced about integrating mind maps in your learning process, check some of its advantages.
- Thinking. Use Mind Maps to come up with fresh ideas and associations.
- Learning. Use it for note-taking during classes and lectures or exam revision.
- Concentrating. Mind Mapping will put you in a focused state, engaging your brain in a way that will inevitably lead to better results.
- Organising. You can use Mind Maps for weddings, trips, and family gatherings.
- Planning. Use Mind Map to prioritise your time.
- Communication. A good Mind Map can highlight the essential points you need to get across.
- Speaking. With a Mind Map, you can have your presentation and speech clear and dynamic.
- Problem-solving. You can use a Mind Map to find solutions to different problems.
And much more.
Take Away
Mind Maps has been described as “the swiss army knife for the brain” because it’s functional and can be applied to cognitive functions such as creativity, learning, memory, and all forms of thinking.
If you’re serious about improving your learning skill and other aspects of your life, you know what to do. Learn Mind Map.
By marrying words and images, and by mirroring the workings of the human brain in its combination of logical and creative input, the Mind Map is the perfect tool for our globalized 21st century. Tony Buzan
Want to know more? Follow me, and stay tuned. In the next few days, I will post about how to Mind Map.
Otherwise, If you want to go by yourself, I recommend this fantastic book by Tony Buzan, creator of Mind Mapping.
