Are you a master of information?… or one of the increasing number of busy people who find it difficult to cope with the volume of information with which you are bombarded?Do you find time for thinking?… or are you sometimes just too busy?

At Holmes the management team was recently introduced to a technique which many of us have found very useful. Here, Clive Lewis, Director of the training company, Illumine, tells us a little about this versatile technique.

Most of us spend hundreds or thousands of hours learning about subjects from Accountancy to Zoology. However most of us have never learnt how to learn; how to read quickly, remember effortlessly and make and take notes effectively and efficiently. Assimilating information and effective thinking are not taught in most schools. Mind Maps are becoming one of the most widely used techniques to help people of all ages and from all walks of life to do just that.

Mind Mapping is a note making, note taking and thinking system that is designed to help people to work, think and learn more effectively. Mind Maps enable people to access their own thinking power and to work and learn in a way that is efficient, effective…and enjoyable.

How Mind Maps Work
Mind Maps have been around for over 30 years and are used in every country in the world. Their originator, Tony Buzan, is renowned as one of the world’s foremost experts on the brain and how to use it better.

They work the same way as the brain; they are designed to mirror the structure of the brain and its most basic building block, the brain cell. Drawing on the research into how the brain is structured and how it works, Buzan created a system which he describes as the external manifestation of the internal workings of the brain.

Buzan’s background is as an educational psychologist. Much of his early work was in schools and universities where people using his techniques quickly achieved impressive results. As well as introducing Mind Maps to students around the world, Buzan has taken Mind Maps into many businesses where the application of the technique has been seized upon as an invaluable aid to thinking, creativity, effective working and information assimilation.

Most systems for making and taking notes are verbose and linear, using skills primarily from the left side of the brain. A Mind Map allows us to work in a way that incorporates colour, patterns, space, imagination and a hierarchical logic; a genuinely whole brained approach.

The other key aspect regarding how the brain works is the importance of association. The role of association in both creativity and memory cannot be over stated. Association is the key process by which thoughts are organised and information retained. Again, Mind Maps are designed to accentuate associations through their unique line structure. By clarifying associations of ideas, which are expressed as single words or pictures, Mind Maps help us to put information into our brains in a way that makes it easy for us to use and access it. It also enables us to work with meaning and context rather than with language structure and syntax!

Getting started
The Mind Map that you can download from the bottom of this page will give you some idea of the basic structure and also of some of the many uses of Mind Maps. The basic steps are:

• Start in the centre of a blank, landscape page with a colourful, unframed image representing the subject
• Make the branches closest to the centre thicker, attached to the image and organic in shape
• Place the main aspects of the subject on these branches
• Branch thinner lines off the end of the main branches and add sub themes
• Use images wherever possible
• The image or work should always sit on a line of the same length
• Add successive levels of detail by adding further branches and simple words or images on them
• Use colour, codes, arrows and highlighting to make each Mind Map more beautiful and colourful
• Have fun and develop your own Mind Mapping style!

If you normally start your notes in the top left hand corner of the page, using one colour and a combination of phrases, sentences, bullets and lists, you may find Mind Maps a little strange to begin with. However it won’t be long before you start to find them an invaluable tool.

You can find out more about the uses of Mind Maps by downloading our Mind Map – “The Uses of Mind Maps”.

Mind Map® and Mind Maps® are trademarks of the Buzan Organisation.
MindManager® and Mindjet® are trademarks of Mindjet. 

  

Tags: Mind Mapping

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Creativity and Innovation, Learning and Studying, Memory, Mind Mapping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.