Answer to the question in headline is one big YES!
Mind mapping is one of my favorite topics, but by spending way too much time in front of my computer, I lost this habit. I only refer to it, as a sort of barrage of thoughts when I brainstorm new ideas. I can only remember the days when I was carefully mind mapping my thoughts for exams and tests back in the high school days. I was making them as colorful and vivid as I could.
That was my way of procrastinating back then, instead of doing actual crude school work. What was amazing about it is that I actually learned way more than I would with simple reading. Making colorful notes and rehashing that kind of knowledge made me remember way better, so while I was enjoying drawing, I actually made quite an improvement in my learning process. Having something you created yourself praticularly for you was drawing you to look at it back again and admire a creation of your own. That way drawing combined with note taking and studying became something that helped me a lot to push though one of the hardest high schools in Serbia.
Mind mapping concept is widely accepted by people who are primarily right brained. Right brained people are creative to an extent, although become distracted easily, and can’t keep up with the pace of the crude structure. Teachers at schools call right brained kids, dyslexic, and not competent for studying. This is the biggest issue of our educational system. It’s flawed; because we got used to that left brain learning is the only way to go. In most of the schools here, people aren’t putting emphasis on the artistic kids.
The third kind of people are ambidextrous. They are using both hemispheres of their brains equally, but usually all of them tender to one side or another. Most of geniuses are ambidextrous. Some of them are leaning to the right side, like Leonardo Da Vinci.
While others tend to fall to the Left Side, like Albert Einstein. If you take a look at their notes, you can immediatly recognize the difference in their styles.
So some main points when you are mind mapping are to take liberty to take notes the way it feels most natural to you. Don’t feel bad if you are making mistakes and if it doesn’t look all that neat and tidy. Those notes are made for you, so don’t worry about anyone else reading them. Even from the ugliest mind map, you can pull a lot of information, just because you drew it. Leonardo didn’t care much about his mirror handwriting only he could understand. So you shouldn’t worry about that either.
Since we don’t live in Leonardo’s age anymore, one great way of capturing your notes is via Evernote. I like to take my handwritten notes into digital form, and make them searchable. That way I can carry them around with me in my cell phone all the time, thus making them endlessly useful.
Mind mapping is a powerful technique. I hope you are encouraged to use it properly, because that way you will get most out of yourself. It will require a lot of “unproductive time” in developing your midnset, that taking libery of taking notes “the way you feel”, will immedaitly make you feel way more different. If you have any questions about mind mapping make sure to leave them in the comments. If you liked this article, please consider liking it on Facebook, thank you.
