Mind Mapping: Improve Memory, Learning, Concentration, Organization, Creativity, and Time Management: Mind Hack, #5

By Kam Knight

The #1 Mind Mapping Book for Nearly a Decade

 

Mind mapping is a learning and organizational tool that improves memory, learning, concentration, organization, creativity, and time management.

 

This is the go-to-book on the topic explaning step-by-step how to use mind maps with note-taking, studying, researching, brainstorming, planning, writing, goal setting, lists, groups, and more.

 

It also offers a detailed discussion on other visual tools like flow charts, concept maps, and cognitive maps to make you the most proficient learner possible.

 

Even more, there is a section on mind mapping with children, helping children tap into their brain's natural ability to remember better, think quicker, and learn more.

 

Each chapter provides vivid examples, with many chapters providing multiple examples

 

In fact, this book has has over 50 mind map images, illustrations, and diagrams - more than any other book.

 

Unlike images in other books, which are only 1 or 2 levels deep, many images in this book go 3 to 4 levels.

 

Seeing all the examples and illustrations is really the way to understand the true power and flexibility of this tool

 

In fact, this the most comprehensive book on mind mapping & visual learning, enhancing your skills in reading, writing, learning, organizing, productivity, and so much more.

 

Give it a shot, it will change the way you interact with information, no matter how complex.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kam Knight
• Release date: Sep 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781957170046

Kam Knight

Kam Knight is a coach, writer, and author of several bestselling books in the area of human and mental performance such as memory, concentration, and productivity. He is known for bringing fresh solutions and insights that are a rare departure from traditional ideas that have been repeated for decades. Because of his fresh perspective, his books have become the gold standard for their respective topics which have helped hundreds of thousands of people. In his pursuit to understand the mind and how to optimize its performance, he has left no stone unturned traveling to nearly 100 countries around the world. His books and courses are a distillation of what he has learned on his incredible journey.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

SECTION I

Introduction

Chapter 1 - What Is Mind Mapping

Chapter 2 - Creating And Enhancing Your Mind Map

SECTION II

Chapter 3 - Taking Notes Of Written Material

Chapter 4 - Lectures And Presentations

SECTION III

Chapter 5 - Research

Chapter 6 - Brainstorming

Chapter 7 - Writing

Chapter 8 - Planning

Chapter 9 - Lists

Chapter 10 - Goal Setting

Chapter 11 - Thematic Projects

Chapter 12 - Group Mind Mapping

SECTION IV

Chapter 13 - Flow Charts

Chapter 14 - Concept Maps

Chapter 15 - Cognitive Maps

SECTION V

Chapter 16 - Mind Mapping For Children

Chapter 17 - Teaching Mind Maps For Different Learning Styles

Chapter 18 - Using Mind Maps As Learning Activities And Around The Home

SECTION VI

Chapter 19 - Mind Mapping Software And Apps

Chapter 20 - Mind Map Samples

Conclusion

SECTION I

INTRODUCTION TO MIND MAPS

Introduction

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From the time we start kindergarten to the time we graduate college, our schools, teachers, and educational system thrust overwhelming amounts of information at us. They tell us to read this, learn that, write this, and practice that. They shovel information and we're expected to cope as best as we can. The further we go, the bigger the shovel.

Although teachers tell us what to learn, they seldom show how. They never really offer proper ways to retain, classify, organize, and remember information. Instead, they feed us everything from when the Civil War started to the atomic weight of oxygen. Those who absorb the information are labeled smart. Those who don’t are left feeling like they lack the ability to do well in school, and worse, in life. Unless we are clever or lucky enough to develop study strategies on our own, we never discover the proper ways to learn and remember what we are taught.

To make matters worse, we now live in the information age. Humans have never been surrounded by as much information as today. In fact, Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, stated that every two days we produce the same amount of information as humans have produced from the dawn of writing to 2003. It is staggering how anyone can get a handle, let alone manage, all of this.

With the constant wave of new knowledge, by the time we master a skill, either more education is required to keep up, or the skill becomes obsolete. This is especially prevalent in the IT world, where new programming languages and technologies replace the old. Even if we wanted to stop learning, we can't for the risk of falling behind in life. We truly live in a time where if we are not moving forward, we are moving backward.

Fortunately, an innovative technique for learning and memory exists. It is a powerful method that mimics how the human brain naturally processes, manages, and stores data. The technique is called mind mapping and it is what you'll learn in this book.

Before reading further, please access your bonus Conquer Internal Resistance: Understand the 3 Tricks Your Mind Uses to Keep You from Finishing Anything You Start. It’s free and supplements this book’s advice to ensure you do more, in less time, and with less effort. You can access the free copy at MindLily.com/ir.

Chapter 1 - What Is Mind Mapping

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Mind mapping is a note-taking tool that organizes words, thoughts, ideas, tasks, activities, and more in the form of a diagram. The diagram starts with a key or main idea in the center of a page, with subtopics radially around the main idea. The subtopics group and cluster similar ideas, and they branch out to lower and even lower-level topics, guiding one to wherever their thoughts go.

Below is an example of what it looks like:

mindlily.com/mind-mapping-intro#1

This mind map discusses the planets of the solar system. As you can see, the main topic is in the center. The solar system has 8 planets, so 8 lines branch out from the center, which represent the subtopics. Each subtopic contains specific details about each planet in clusters around that planet. These are the lower-level topics.

This is the fundamental nature of mind maps. It begins with a thought, idea, or problem in the middle, and then branches outward. The design is similar to a tree in that one keyword or idea starts the process, and from there, other interconnected and related entities stem.

Mind mapping is not a new concept. It has been around for over a millennium, and legendary intellects such as Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso are known to have utilized the method. More recently, Tony Buzan popularized and systematized the technique in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, mind map and mind maps are registered trademarks of Buzan’s company. He has written books and produced shows about the concept. Since Buzan’s work, more and more have become enthusiastic users of the system.

Benefits of Mind Mapping

The benefits to mind mapping are many. For starters, they improve learning and memory by working in line with the associative nature of the brain. In addition, they make it quicker to process and easier to organize information. More importantly, the technique enhances creativity and encourages brevity. The following discusses each benefit in detail.

Associations

Every new thought or idea your brain has or learns needs to connect to other thoughts and ideas. When you learn a new piece of information, that fact doesn’t aimlessly float around in your head. Instead, it attaches itself to something else. This is the way the brain works—by connecting thoughts, ideas, and experiences to other thoughts, ideas, and experiences. Each thought or idea in your head has hundreds to thousands of links in your mind.

For instance, have you ever seen or heard something while going about your day that then prompted a whole set of other memories? The memories are so vivid that you can feel the experience all over again. Perhaps you open the windows early in the morning and smell fresh-cut grass combined with newly blooming lilacs. Suddenly you are taken back to when you were ten years old. Your brother was mowing the lawn while your mother arranged hand-picked lilacs in a vase, and you sneezed at the strong scent. You relive the moment as the memory surges back like it was yesterday.

This is the brain making an association. It’s taking the current experience brought on by the smell of newly-blooming lilacs and connecting it to an earlier encounter with the smell. If the brain were not associative, it would not bring up past experiences this way. In fact, the next time you encounter the smell of lilacs, that experience will more than likely be associated with the current one as well as the one from childhood.

The brain makes such associations with every thought, idea, and experience. When learning about the Revolutionary War in history class, your mind connected it to guns, fighting, battles, and explosions because that is what movies and books have taught us about war. When you learned about numbers in school, the teacher connected them to quantities of physical objects like the number of crayons in a box. When you were taught the alphabet, each letter was associated with items whose name begins with that letter—a for apple, b for bear. Your teacher did this because to understand and retain new bits of data, the brain needs to connect it to something else.

In the solar system example, you can see that mind maps follow a similar structure. They start off with a topic or idea in the center, and then associate other ideas around it. From there, even more thoughts and ideas join the subordinate ideas. Each piece of information is always connected to another piece. This is the way mind maps are structured. They bring together information in an associative way, similar to your brain.

Incorporates Sense of Sight

Another benefit of mind maps is that they incorporate the sense of sight. If you look at the above mind map again, more or less, it is an image processed by the same mechanisms that process sight. And the parts of the brain that process sight are much quicker and more powerful than the parts that process other types of information. Not only are images quicker to process, but they are easier to remember. In 1970, Ralph Haber published research asserting that people have a recognition accuracy of images between 85 and 95 percent. This is true even if you are not a visual person.

To demonstrate, suppose you work at a gifts and accessory store. A customer walks in asking if the shop carries a particular keychain, which she describes by saying it has a metal ring where all the keys go. Attached to the metal ring is a flower, which is made of leather and has eight petals. The top part of the flower is purplish pink and the bottom is a light pink. The center of the flower is yellowish orange with a metal button in the middle. Also, there is a threaded seam around the edge of each petal.

Although the above description is detailed, it doesn’t give you much to work with. With this narrative, one can conjure many different types of flowers. You may find the correct keychain or you may not.

What if, however, this person shows you a picture of the keychain? Instead of describing it in words, she says, here is how it looks:

From the above picture, you instantly know what the accessory looks like and for what you must search. There is no need for the customer to write a lengthy description, nor is there a need to process that description. The connection is immediate.

Not to mention, the picture leaves little room for misinterpretation. Although the verbal description accurately described the keychain, it probably wasn’t the image that initially popped in your mind. There was likely some disconnect between the customer’s words and your interpretation of those words. With images, there is less likelihood of that happening.

Even more, you are likely to remember this image longer, and in more detail, than the words used to describe the image. Two weeks or even a month down the road, there is a good chance you will still have a clear impression of the picture. As far as her words, there is a good chance you have already forgotten them.

It’s for this reason mind maps are such an amazing tool. Because they employ a part of the brain that is faster, more powerful, and more efficient, their visual nature makes them easier to process and even easier to remember. By incorporating this aspect into learning, you can understand information better and remember it longer. If you play video games, think of how a graphics card increases the computing power of a computer. Using mind maps is like hooking up the processing power of a graphics card directly to the brain.

Better Organization of Information

Mind maps make it easier to organize information. In traditional forms of organization, we frequently write information line by line or in the form of an outline. With line-by-line note taking, there is no certainty of linking of information. Facts and ideas may be placed without any care for how they are related to one another, even though we’ve learned that it’s essential for both memory and comprehension.

Although outlines do a better job of connecting information, they are limited in design and functionality. If we were to organize the diagram of the solar system into an outline, it would look as follows:

PLANETS

I. Mercury

A. Position—1st

B. Type—Rocky

C. Size—Smallest

D. Atmosphere

i. Potassium

ii. Sodium

II. Venus

A. Position—2nd

B. Type—Rocky

C. Size—3rd Smallest

D. Atmosphere

i. Nitrogen

ii. Carbon Dioxide

iii. Sulfuric Acid

III. Earth

A. Position—3rd

B. Type—Rocky

C. Size—4th Smallest

D. Atmosphere

i. Nitrogen

ii. Oxygen

E. Only Planet w/ Life

To keep the illustration simple, this outline summarizes only the first three planets—Mercury, Venus, and Earth. The outline is clear and well-organized with indents and numbers displaying how ideas are grouped. The first indent lists the planets, while the second lists features of each planet. From there, each additional indent lists the details of each feature.

Although there is organization in this outline, it is strictly hierarchical. Adding in a new idea requires a whole new numbering scheme. Anyone who has worked on a paper can confirm how troublesome it can be to rearrange information inside an outline, especially in the early stages of brainstorming. If a sudden surge of creativity arises, it will be difficult to insert those inspired thoughts. Outlines have their place, but they are not the best option for

Reviews for Mind Mapping

[JP · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Awesome. I was a fan of mind mapping even before I read this book. And this book helped me plan, structure and execute my mind-mapping-based content.