Chapter 4

Why Mind Mapping Works

In This Chapter

Understanding how people assimilate and process information

Learning why pictures are important to us

Knowing how we think

Mind Maps as a brain-friendly technique

When Mind Maps aren’t the right method

Tony Buzan, who developed Mind Mapping as I present it in this book, calls the technique the ‘Swiss army knife for the brain’. Just like the famous Swiss army knife, a Mind Map is very easy to use and yet at the same time is very versatile. Using it, you can visualise, structure and organise almost any kind of information.

Moreover, Mind Mapping is not only simple and versatile but also brain friendly. What do I mean by that? The way in which Mind Maps are prepared and how they operate is naturally suited to the functioning of the human brain. Mind Mapping was developed in the 1970s on the basis of the latest findings (at the time) in the field of learning and memory. Discoveries of aspects of human thought processes influenced the development of Mind-Mapping rules. The upshot of this is that most Mind-Mapping users describe the technique as follows:

Quick and easy to implement

Easily memorised

Quickly recalled

Supports the generation of new thoughts and other notions

Mind Mapping is a tool that’s easy and intuitive to use and helps us with our natural thought processes and information processing.

This is achieved because Mind Mapping is orientated towards the natural processes in our brains and takes the following aspects into account:

There are many different ways in which we process and store information.

Visual information plays a central role in our brains.

We think by leaps and bounds and by association.

We are especially good at memorising basic key concepts but quite poor at retaining a lot of detail.

These aspects are examined in greater detail below and then used to show how they’re incorporated in the Mind-Mapping technique and why this makes Mind Mapping a very powerful, brain-friendly tool.

Different Routes to Information

Imagine that you have to take notes in a meeting or need to draw up a plan for a project. In both cases you have to process and present information.

The following elements play an important role in this:

Logic: How you arrange the information. You organise it into aspects that are logical to you.

Rules: The way in which you set out information follow rules that make sense to you. For example, in this book there are many models showing how information is structured. You’ll probably have already noticed that I work a good deal with item lists in which information is presented.

Use of words: Language plays a central role in assimilating and processing information and also in communicating and expressing information to other people. You assimilate the information in this book mainly by reading my text.

Use of numbers: Another important way of processing and storing content involves numbers. They’re used not only in counting and calculating but are also relevant when, for example, a sequence of things has to be expressed.

These aspects certainly come into play when you process and present information. Many books and texts are based on these elements alone. However, our brains also perceive other aspects, even if they don’t occur in many books and texts:

Pictures: Whether mental or real, pictures play a central role in our brains. In the next section I examine this aspect more closely.

Colours: Different colours help us to distinguish between objects and to derive meaning from them. Colours often stand for a specific concept and are quickly perceived as such. Traffic lights are a good example of this.

Places: The spatial arrangement of objects also contains information which we assimilate and use. For example, the principle of spatial organisation is utilised in many memorisation techniques. Articles we wish to memorise are associated with different parts of the body or are arranged mentally within a familiar room or along a familiar stretch of road. We can then return to these places in our minds and recall the information located there. This book uses the same principle by marking symbols with a particular meaning in the left-hand margin of the text concerned.