What Is A MindMap? MindMapping?

While mindmapping techniques have been around for centuries, they were popularized by Tony Buzan, who trademarked the term Mindmap ™. Buzan was most famous for developing and writing about memory-building, retention, and speed-reading techniques in the 1970s and 80s (TV shows and books).

Because Buzan’s term is trademarked, it is alternately called a brainmap, topic map, or simply a map. For the same reason, there are a number of different ways to draw these topic maps: ovals, circles, squares, rectangles, no shapes, as well as thin and thick lines, and lines with or without arrowheads.

The result in most cases is the map diagram created resembles what we’ve come to accept as representing a schematic of the system of neurons and synapses in the human brain - hence the name mindmap. This sort of mapping is an ideal way of planning a project, organizing new information, or even plotting out a diagram of what you already know about a topic.

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I taught mapping techniques (informally) to a number of people, only to find that the techniques were already being taught in high schools and even some junior high schools. I have used brain maps for nearly everything I do, as I tend to work on a lot of projects big and small. They’ve stood me in good stead, and they are second nature to me. I find that if I do not brain map a new project, no matter the size, I inevitably run into project management or general organizational problems.

Brain maps are useful to any sort of planning, regardless of the business you are in, simply because they mimic the hyper- or tangential thinking that we all do on a daily basis. [Some people feel that a diagram of the hyperlinks of a website, or even the entire Internet, would be a good example of an enormous brain map. However, because such a diagram would have crossing lines, this is not strictly true.]

The process is very simple. Starting with a fresh piece of blank paper, write down a few words representing a very general (umbrella) topic. Draw a rough circle or oval around it. Now, immediately brainstorm. Write down, in a clockwise (or counter-clockwise) direction, a few words representing any ideas that are triggered by the central idea. Draw ovals around them, too, so that you have something that resemblings an odd star pattern.

Repeat the process with each secondary idea that you just wrote down. You will only have a semi-circle at this point. The trick is to be very brief in the wording you use. The details come in the outer layers of the map.

The resulting image will look vaguely like a diagram of the brain. Especially if you use different colors of ink or pencil for each tier or cluster of ideas. (I’ll update this article with example diagrams at a later date.)

While the brainstorming process is aided by creating these maps manually on paper, there are a variety of software packages available, some of which are free. Peter Russell has a list of of brain mapping software. Mindjet is arguably the most well-known; Freemind is a reasonable free brain mapping package. Many of the commercial brain mapping packages in Russell’s list have free trial versions.

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