MAP OF THOUGHTS (exercise)

Drawing a mind map was invented by Tony Buzan, an English psychologist who has been looking all his life for how to make the brain work faster and more productively. The method quickly spread and now you can find various programs and services for drawing maps on the Internet, including the free iMindMap application for creating a map on the screen of your gadget. In general, it doesn’t matter where you create your map – on a mobile device, on your home computer, or manually, on a piece of paper. The effect of this is not lost.

What is a mind map?

All of your to-dos, ideas, and plans are somehow related to each other, but these connections are not on the to-do list. It turns out that you see your goals separately and because of this, simple and obvious solutions are often lost.

If you try to write all the cases on a piece of paper and indicate with arrows how they are connected to each other, you will get a more complete picture, and if at the same time you make the arrows multi-colored, draw small pictures and icons, the information will be better remembered, and on the sheet in front of you will appear clear problem or task in the form of a structure.

Why use it?

The mind map is suitable for brainstorming, solving personal or professional problems. Multi-colored maps help students well – in many universities, especially in creative specialties, it is advised to draw such structures and diagrams.

The mind map helps the brain get involved in the problem, fully embrace it and better remember the result. This can be useful for any task, from developing a business to memorizing a summary of history.

So, the map will help you if:

You need to simplify your plans and ideas, make them more understandable and easier to understand.
You get information from different sources and want to create a big picture.
You need new ideas, interesting solutions and a non-standard approach to the problem.
You want to remember information better, such as a summary.
Why does it work?
Creating a mind map is similar to the process of thinking itself. It combines two types of activity – creative and analytical, for which different hemispheres of the brain are responsible. The right is responsible for spatial orientation, imagination and thinking, and the left is for analysis and logic.

When you start walking around the room or drawing something in a notebook during a complex explanation, this is an unconscious attempt to get both hemispheres of the brain to work.

A mind map helps on the same principle: in the process of creating it, you use both hemispheres, so as a result, more of the cerebral cortex is working, more neurons are involved, which means that the abilities of memory, perception and thinking increase.

How to draw a map?

As mentioned above, there are special applications for creating mind maps, but it is better to draw your first mind map by hand.

Take a sheet of paper no smaller than A4 and lay it horizontally.
Draw in the center the most important problem or idea – the main thing for which you started drawing.
Around the main idea, write problems and ideas that relate to it in some way.
Connect the main task with additional (secondary importance) thick lines.
Expand problems and plans in more detail – draw even smaller ones around secondary tasks and also connect them with arrows and lines.
As a result, you will get a single picture of your problem with all thoughts, ideas and plans. After that, you will surely see some new opportunities.

How to make your card more efficient?

There are a few tips to help make the map more understandable:

Sign the branches with keywords – this will make it easier to understand the connections.
Use different colors, shapes, arrows, fonts, icons – all these visual elements help you remember and perceive information better.
Arrange secondary topics clockwise around the main idea.
Draw different ideas with different colors.
Don’t get stuck on one topic. Nothing good comes to mind – go to another topic, later return to this one and think it over.
Where to begin?
Everyone has a few topics that are constantly put off “for later”, so you can start with them.

Buy colored markers, take the time to draw your first mind map.
Drawing a mind map can seem like fun – just have fun with the process and you will definitely find a solution for any task.