How to Mind Map

When it comes to the major proponents of how to mind map, there’s probably nobody more active or better known in making this type of thinking popular and prominent than the author and educational consultant, Tony Buzan. It’s not that he invented this technique, though he claims that he created its modern version. Making a visual map of the concepts and ideas contained in an argument or an explanation of information appears to have been used as far back as the third century of the Common Era. But there’s no doubt that Tony Buzan was the driving force in bringing the technique into use in the twentieth century.

Buzan stands on the shoulders of several others who developed earlier precursors of mind map methods. Allan M. Collins and M. Ross Quillian in particular completed research on “semantic networks,” exploring how learning, creativity and graphical thinking were related. But Buzan also credits the semantic theories of Alfred Korzybski as his inspiration for understanding how to create a mind map. These theories were given life by science fiction novelists such as Robert Heinlein and A.E. van Vogt, but it was Buzan who put them into popular form and made them accessible to the general public.

For Tony Buzan mind maps are much more aligned with the way people naturally scan pages of text. Rather than reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom, as Western schools teach, people absorb the contents of pages in a more visual, non-linear way, according to Buzan. Thus, when they learn how to mind map, they are relating to material with their right brain. And when they do this, they may discover relationships between ideas that they had never recognized before.

Learning how to mind map can be accomplished in many ways, but Buzan aims to help people with the mind mapping application, “iMindMap,” which he released in 2006. He works constantly to promote these techniques, through all of his books and his own website, “Buzan World.” Although he has founded so many organizations that work on people’s memory and knowledge skills in other ways, he is likely always to be known as the most vocal voice of the twentieth century in promoting mind map techniques.