Business Management Skills

It’s a left brain/right brain thing, according to those who teach how to make a mind map. Most education follows a left-brain way of working: logical and linear, with everything traveling in straight lines. But what if the education system isn’t taking advantage of the way the right brain works? That side of the brain is more visual, creating associations and relationships rather than marching in straight lines. Mind map methods try to work in concert with right-brain styles of thinking, and expand people’s ways of learning and understanding.

The use of such mind tools isn’t intended to be exclusionary and shut left-brain thinking right out. Rather, people who talk about these tools hope that the world can learn to add right-brain thinking as a method that works in partnership with the centuries old, tried-and-true methods employed by the left brain. The goal is to discover relationships and possibilities that might never have been recognized in the left-brain way of approaching knowledge. Learning to make a mind map may be a way of expanding that knowledge beyond its previous boundaries.

So how does one begin making a mind map? One starts with a central concept or idea, written on a piece of paper, a white or blackboard, or perhaps on a computer screen. Then the brainstorming begins. One can do this alone, but it’s even more effective with several people. Everyone tosses out any idea they think of that relates to that central concept, and all ideas are written down. Once everyone is done, all the concepts are analyzed and gathered into broad themes that suggest themselves, essentially doing visual mapping to link common ideas together.

Once all related ideas have pretty much been exhausted, visual thinking takes things several steps further, gathering together the concepts that suggest a relationship to each other. These might be connections that the viewer was never really aware of before, but once they are seen in almost pictorial form, they can seem almost obvious. Learning to make a mind map can be a new way of enhancing the context of ideas, using both the left and right halves of the brain to create a much wider picture.

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