Mind mapping – A way to get in-depth knowhow about anything!

I think many people are familiar with this word – Mind Mapping, especially the designers. This is something I learnt in my design institute, where every project’s first step was to do the mind mapping. We wrote the inspiration in the center and did brainstorming, writing every word we could connect with it by linking them through arrows. We kept asking ourselves all the why, where, what, how, whom, when at the same time. And it worked wonders for us. All those years, I never thought about who invented it, is there an even better way to use it or is it useful in other things too? Today when I had all such questions in my mind, I did a research on it and what I found was shocking! I never used even 40% of it as the way it could have been used.

Starting with the facts, the modern mind mapping was invented by Tony Buzan. He mentioned four important things about how mind map is more helpful that just writing notes. They are –

Colours – They help us differentiate one aspect from the other and can be remembered easily by our brains.
Arrows – These are the connectors and help us link one word to the other.
Center and exploding out – There needs to be a center, the main point and then all the ideas exploding from that center can be written with the help of arrows. This is how our brain thinks!
Pictures/ images – We can remember visuals more easily than words and that is a key point of this mind mapping.

For me, its not just problem solving, it helps us know about anything and everything in depth. And of course it creates a visual that cannot be easily forgotten.

There are even softwares that help people to create a mindmap which is cool for presentations. But if you really want to know anything, just take a pen and paper and start mind mapping.