Minds on Maps
Brain Sprawl
Neurons reach when we are curious, making our brains grow new maps. Maps are shepherds of curious minds and instigators of traveling thought. Meaningful maps arise from curiosity.
Communities in the Maps
We are curious about where to go, and why. Community maps emerge in Twitter lists, Instagram groups, Google+ Circles, subscriber lists. Physical maps are best, especially when made by eccentrics with a sense of cartography. Infographics are usually not maps, they're statistics with better clothes.
Mapping Community
I'm mapping an art community with an eye toward higher visibility for the emerging renaissance of creative reuse. The maps must arise organically from my brain, then come back to earth with the cartographer's sensibility. I am the only one who can make this map. I yearn to express the connections I see. To make introductions. To put fire to the wick and step back. I have been mapping this map for over a decade. I am getting closer.
Map, You Will
Mapping was the only way my world made sense, as a child with some untreated form of autism. Before I entered school I was showing myself my brain in connected shapes on paper. Never was there a time I could make sense without making a map. In 1974, Tony Buzan's book hotwired my maps by affirming my child-wisdom. Since then, I have created many kinds of maps from collage to multimedia. Most of my maps show up in my journals. There is an actual sensation that lives in me related to all the connect-the-dots, shapes and words. But that's the synesthesia talking.
If you allow it, your maps will show you your brain. Noodling around in a journal takes the writer's mind onto a map for the day or the year. Mind mapping applications are now ubiquitous, but because they present you with ready-made choices for visuals, they may not be as productive as paper and colored pens or pencils. Get your hands into your map. Start at your center and give it a few names. Circle them. Move out to the next onion layer and add your people, ideas, loves, obligations. Observe connections, represent them with lines, wiggly waggly. Stay organic. Boxes and columns can come later. This close, physical, organic mapping is where your primal innovation lives. Don't bypass it too early.
Map From Your Brain
Mind mapping is easily over-tooled. To let your brain tell you what connects to what involves significant play and nonconformity. To map from your own brain, you must be curious about discovery. You are extending your physical design onto the paper, not the other way around. You are inviting your neural complexity to reveal its chaos, which can only become relevant after it has fallen off the shelf and broken open. Begin with nothing, the most nothing you can muster.
Tooling Up the Map
Doodling your way into higher productivity does have some tech-tool friends. Mind mapping, graphic recording, and Sketchnoting (might as well give Mike Rohde that one, he deserves it), are all newer forms of bringing our brain's connections into the light. We can all use these tools, and if we keep coming back to the tool-in-hand cartography, scratching it out on the rock wall, the connections can come to life.
Map on. Map with love.
Suzanna Stinnett
Early Influences:
Tony Buzan, "Use Your Head," 1974.
Peter Russell, "The Global Brain" (video), 1986.
Roger von Oech, "A Whack on the Side of the Head," 1983.
Tools to See:
Mike Rohde and Sketchnotes
http://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes/
@Rohdesign
Chuck Frey and Mind Mapping Software
http://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/
@ChuckFrey
Roger Von Oech and Creativity
http://www.creativethink.com/
@RogervonOech
Suzanna on Twitter:
@Brainmaker
Suzanna on Google+
