Their motivation to use a resource basically results from seeing benefits arising from use and also advantages, that is, relative benefits. Mind maps are a resource, and it is therefore important to know their benefits.
Here we show you how mind maps can add value not only to what you do but also to how you think about what you do.
Introduction: Limiting a large scope
Structured and organized remembrance
Introduction: Limiting a large scope
When we make a decision, benefits are a critical factor, as they give rise to motivation, to why we do something. And when looking for the benefits of something, there can be a lot to consider:
- There can be direct and indirect benefits.
- There may be developments, one benefit leads to another as a result.
- The benefit may be relative, that is, in comparison with something else, when it is then called advantage.
Whereas certain changes result in a butterfly effect, a single benefit can have a long horizon of impacts in time and space. There can also be material, thinking, and emotional benefits.
Often what is done has costs, such as time, effort and finance; cost-benefit ratio (RCB) can then be assessed.
Due to so many possibilities, the scope of this article has been limited to the benefits of mind maps that I consider more direct, more nuclear, more fundamental.
Structure visualization
Imagine that you are looking to build the house of your dreams. What you do first is identify needs, conveniences, comforts, desires, maybe even one luxury or another. The next step is, if you don't delegate, sketch out the structure of the house, in the form of a floor plan.
You will have to talk to someone about the project, either with who else will live in the house, or with who will build it. I ask: what would it be like to talk about the house without the plan? Check this by trying to describe your current residence in words. It will start with something like "four bedrooms, two suites, two living rooms, pantry, kitchen...". You will even be able to inform the structure, like how many and which rooms, but when you get to the organization of the rooms and the details, you will have difficulties and it may even be impractical.
In another context: how would we do without road maps? What if we had the highways and cities described only in common language, that is, prose?
By looking at a road map, we can quickly find out which cities exist, where they are, and what the possible paths are between them. A map quickly tells us what is in a territory and how things are arranged in relation to others. Here too, as in the floor plan, we have structure and organization.
Visual Structure Models
Plans and maps play an important role in representing information: they visually show us the structure of real estate. In other words, they constitute visual models of the structure of real estate.
A visual model of the structure has the fundamental role and function of guiding observation. For example, by looking at the floor plan of a house, we identify the rooms and then we can focus on one room at a time. From this structure, we can apply divide-and-conquer and it is much easier to maintain concentration due to the visual support.
A visual model of the structure makes it possible for us to structure our observation and facilitates our concentration.
Knowing the structure, we can also record information in memory in a structured way and this facilitates the retrieval of information, commonly called remembering.
For example, what is in the kitchen of your house? You first thought/remembered the kitchen and took a "peek" – observed it in your mind -, finding at least stove, sink, cabinets. And inside a closet, what's there? Now you've focused on the closet, "opened" it, and looked at what's in it.
Note the structural levels: the house, inside this the kitchen, inside this the closet, inside these compartments. The structure first guides memorization, then guides retrieval. All you want to handle a lot of information is a visually modeled structure!
A visual model of the structure makes it easy to memorize and therefore remember.
Learning often consists of associating, "fitting" new information into what is already learned, but where to do this is not always clear. With a visually explicit structure, these new associations can be quickly made in the appropriate place.
The figure that represents the model of the structure can be on paper, on canvas or just in the mind. If you have it memorized, you don't need external support, which we have to turn to only to remember the parts that we are not remembering.
Visualizing the structure, as in the case of a plant, we can quickly remember what we know about the whole and its components. Retrieving information, we can make evaluations, make decisions, in short, we can think about the modeled object, we can think about a component while maintaining its relationship with other components and the whole.
A visual model of the structure increases the power of thinking about what is modeled.
Application to mind maps
Mind maps play this role of a visual model of a structure, in this case a structure of information and knowledge, and thus support observation and concentration, facilitate memorization and recall, and increase the power of thought related to the mapped content.
This applies when the mind map has "lean," synthetic topics that contain only one idea; discursive topics with multiple ideas undermine these effects. One of the criteria for the quality of a mind map is precisely to have an idea per topic.
If you have a mind map, you have a structure to house new information. If you have new information, you simply go to find which topic it will be a subtopic of. If you don't, one possibility is that the structure of the mind map is incomplete and needs to be improved.
These benefits do not derive only from the fact that there is a mind map about a content. As with texts, the quality of the organization of ideas will determine whether the reader will experience clarity or confusion to some extent.
Structured and organized remembrance
Think of some memorable trip you took.
Now remember something particularly interesting from this trip.
Before I asked for it, you didn't have these memories in mind, right? To fulfill what I asked, you had to access your memory and retrieve, "bring" the memories.
The fact is that our thinking processes active informationin the mind, in a manner analogous to the computer, which requires the information to be in working memory, RAM; information on the hard drive or other permanent storage resource cannot be processed directly.
About this characteristic, we say that thought processes present information. Some time ago I saw a phrase that said "What you know is what you remember at the time"; It expresses the fact that we may have information available in memory, but there is still the additional step of activating it so that it can be used.
Thought processes present information.
And one of the ways our memory works is through stimuli, analogous to the "search key", which we call clues. Above, I asked for a "memorable trip". If the clue was "remarkable meeting" or "an experience of intense pleasure", the result would be different.
By the way, to understand language, we need to discover the meaning of words, and we do this by retrieving content from memory; You possibly remembered a remarkable encounter or an experience of intense pleasure just to put together a meaning for the previous sentence – and this one, of course.
Application to mind maps
A mind map also acts as a stimulus to retrieve and make information present. Since the mind map has a structure, this information will be associated according to this structure.
A mind map stimulates the organized retrieval of memory content.
Thus, each time you observe a mind map, your memory will be accessed and information will be retrieved and organized according to the structure of that mind map. If the mind map image is memorized, then you will not need the physical diagram for this purpose.
Vision of the whole
I've heard of women who look at their face in the mirror, notice that there's a pimple and feel "ugly." True or not, this illustrates something that can occur in perception: it focuses on something very specific while losing sight of the whole. If a woman with a pimple looked at the whole, she could see that the pimple is a fragment in the whole of the face, that it is a component of the whole body and this would show that a pimple by itself does not have as much impact on aesthetics
Occasionally we may be focusing on only a part of a whole, just like someone who is in the dark and only has a flashlight to see. A very illustrative case was that of a lady who entered her daughter's apartment and immediately said: "What a dark room, change apartments!"
Application to mind maps
With a mental map that represents a whole, we can devote attention to a part, but aware of the whole to which the part belongs. In this case, we prefer, instead of focus, to say that we are emphasizing the part. This is analogous to, looking at the floor plan of a house and devoting attention to/emphasizing a room, keeping in mind the whole of the house.
Mind maps stimulate and provide a vision of the whole.
Stability and quality of planning
Everything we do intentionally has a plan behind it, the actions are thought out in advance. We may not put this plan on paper or in an app, we may not have all the details and we may not even be aware that we are thinking about the plan, but it necessarily has to be created and maintained.
If this is still not clear enough to you, do a little exercise. Suppose you are going to change residence and decided to take everything you have, how would you do it? It's relatively easy to pre-structure a basic plan, isn't it? Boxes, freight or other transport, storage... Maybe you even reacted to what you imagined; Really, changing is really boring, except for the good part after its completion.
And every plan involves structure, whether of products or activities. If you are going to travel, you will have origin, destination and means of transport. If you are going to build, the first structure is the floor plan; The second level is the one that each room will have. If you are going to teach regularly, you will have a syllabus as a structure for the content and a structure of classes for the activities. If you are going to write a book, your work will have parts, chapters, sections, appendices.
(http://gardenplansfree.com/animals/dog-house-plans-free)
The first levels of a structure are crucial for the stability of what we are going to do. For example, include or remove a chapter in the middle of a well-trodden book and you will have to rewrite much of the rest. In fact, the level doesn't even need to be higher. For example, in a house under construction, increase only one centimeter in an already installed window; What are the impacts?
Application to mind maps
The structure of information products and other types is often hierarchical and thus can be worked out in a mind map. With the agility of doing this in an application, we can work and stabilize the entire structure before starting development, thus minimizing the probability of rework.
"Probability", yes, because, although structuring is one of the first activities, its first versions still do not have feedback from experience, and it is very likely that there will be changes resulting from deepening. Patience, that's how things are when prioritizing quality.
Working structures in mind maps speeds up the work and minimizes rework.
Collaboration productivity
When we work in collaboration or partnership, it is very important to know where we converge and where we diverge. When content is structured, it is much easier to identify these points and in a very specific way.
To better support these statements in your thinking, compare these scenarios to the definition of a house by two or more people:
- just talking
- with a text document
- with a plant
Application to mind maps
When I made my first mind mapping app, I did a service for a family member, American, mining consultant. He liked the resource very much and started to use it in meetings to plan the shutdown of furnaces, which are very complex. The length of the meetings dropped sharply, and the overall results were so good that a company he worked for bought 10 licenses of the app.
Mind maps, being structured, greatly facilitate the identification of points of convergence and divergence. And, done in an app, we then have a scenario of high productivity.
Possible emotional benefits
Emotions are highly subjective, which makes it difficult to be specific about what might happen to someone who starts using mind maps. There are even people who don't even feel emotions and feelings about technical things, whether it's writing an essay, driving a car or using a tool
Let's then comment on some possibilities that serve as starting points so that you can evaluate what can happen emotionally to you – or not happen.
Reaction to confusion
A very common feeling is confusionor lack of clarity. A possible causal factor of this feeling is the disorganization of ideas; There are ideas, but their relations are not well defined or established.
A mind map can work as a productive resource to obtain better organization: we put the ideas into topics, at first without organization, and then we look for the best structure, which will then be the basis for the organization (a place for each thing, each thing in its place). In my experience, doing this in a structured tool is much easier than doing it in a text, because the structure is represented visually.
Confusion is at first a mental sensation, not an emotion, but a person may have an emotional reaction to the sensation, such as a slight panic, which not only does not contribute but aggravates the situation. Having a resource to seek quality of organization puts the person more on the path of objectivity and less on the path of emotion.
Fear
A person, faced with a task that they consider difficult, may feel some kind of fear, such as not being able to do it. More specifically, fear refers to the consequences of not being able to cope. It's like the so-called fear of heights; It is not precisely height that people fear, but what might happen if they fall.
A good test of this statement is a thought experiment. Imagine yourself walking on a thin board 10 centimeters high. No problem?
Now imagine that this board is 10 meters high. To make the scenery more beautiful, imagine that the board is on two very high hills, down there is a waterfall. Fear? Fear? Be careful, panicking increases the risk of falling!
In the last scenario, add a safety rope and see what happens to what you feel.
A tool, such as mind maps, expands our capacity. If we have a task that seems difficult but we know that we have the resources to help us think and work, this will make us more confident, not exactly with the certainty that we will be able to handle it, but that we can try to do the task with a greater probability of succeeding to some extent.
Of course, the mastery we have of the tool also counts: the more we know how to use it, the more capable we will be of doing things with it.
Overload
Much of our thinking is processed subconsciously or unconsciously. For example, you are reading this fluently because the interpretation and assembly of meanings is being done automatically or, as I prefer, spontaneously.
This is possible because you learned/trained how to do it, something very complex and that took years to master at this level. For my own reference, I consider that the conscious part is only about 5% of what I do, everything else is subconscious.
Some learnings go straight to the subconscious, without conscious participation, as in the case of babies and children. When there is this conscious participation, there is a stage of fixing the learning, which then becomes available for use.
We have a limited ability to process information consciously. When we are exposed to too much new information at once, we can feel overwhelmed, that is, we are not able to process what we already have, much less absorb more new things.
(https://www.opencolleges.edu.au)
In order to proceed, new information must become subconscious so that it is accessible and available for use. One way to do this is to simply disconnect from the content in question, allowing the brain to process the new information. In the context of creativity, this step is called incubation and is done intentionally.
One way to be able to process more information consciously is to have a structure for it. If the structure has a visual model, even better. Note that this follows directly from what we said above about structure visualization.
Being mind maps basically structure models, they can help in cases of overload. For example, a teacher who teaches with the support of mind maps is contributing to preventing overload in his students.
