Whether you are a student, an educator, an academic .. or a clinician.
Capturing our thoughts might be one of the most difficult tasks, in face of all the information overload surrounding us.
Examining one's self-thought process and working to visually represent it can be an excellent way to navigate our thoughts and ideas.
By visually representing various pieces of information, you will be able to create an initial framework to organize, connect key concepts and create structured, logical, and meaningful information maps.
Cognitive mapping is the umbrella term for all visual mental representations for a given knowledge domain.
The idea is simple. you visually represent the bits and pieces of information you have to make it easy for your future self (or others) to quickly visualize and get a glimpse of the concept.
There are really no rules or restrictions on how to do this. But you mostly want to capture your thoughts, break down your ideas into broad and build onto more specific ideas till you are able to refine your thinking, have a clear process, and explore connections between them.
Concept maps and visual maps are more or less similar yet different in the complexity and the specifications on relationships between ideas.
Concept maps are more used in education and when trying to lay out a complex topic. visual maps are the more straightforward organizational structure that can be quickly created for productivity and personal concepts.
Personally and on an academic level, the mind mapping skill is a powerful and flexible tool to learn that can boost your thinking, deepen your learning, and help to integrate your building new knowledge into the existing knowledge structure. By this, it makes it much easier for you as a student, clinician, academic to create, communicate and synthesize ideas into a simple digital ecosystem that is at fingertip reach at all times.
Many of the recent note-taking tools depend on this concept of building new knowledge on existing spatially structured ideas and concepts with a heavy emphasis on building relationships and cross-linking connections between this vast knowledge sphere you have.
This has proved on many levels to enhance thinking, build a propositional framework of understanding, improve retaining and recall of complex knowledge domains in the long term memory and create a more meaningful learning experience.
How to build your visual mind map flow?
Keep it simple.
I've read few books and took courses on mind mapping. And I've learned few techniques on how it should be used and structured. but the truth is, you should build your system, however, it serves the purpose you need it for.
for example, if you plan to use it for a coming project:
Write down all your ideas and thoughts on the blank page. Don't think too much, don't refrain and judge the thought and idea, you can examine it later but for now, just keep it there.
Examine your thoughts, the visual layout will help you structure your thinking process. try to see if you can build a hierarchical structure from a high general level on top, going to more specific and less general concepts below.
Think of relationships and try to actively synthesize cross-links between your ideas.
If appropriate see if this relates to prior knowledge or ideas you have and see where can you build new on top of existing connections to evolve your conceptual framework continuously.
This process of actively building a cognitive structure, while very simple, will help you continuously evolve and build your personal framework. This is based on the learning theory of constructivism where the learner actively constructs his knowledge base.
What tools to use?
Again, keep it simple.
I personally use Xmind and scapple for this specific purpose. To each its own purpose use. They are both very easy and takes a lot of the friction in the creating process. This is very important because to have a momentum of flow, you want to have a frictionless system of capturing your thoughts.
For bigger chunks of knowledge, I highly advise investing some time to learn Roam.
Once you start learning how to use this tool, it will change your way of interacting with your ideas, knowledge, and learning.
It will expand your thinking and enable you to visualize your knowledge framework and allow you to easily build connections and synthesize new relationships you wouldn't have discovered if not visually laid the way Roam will present it to you.
I have found the visual graph and the bidirectional linking between ideas extremely helpful and useful and truly changing the learning process I go through.
This is an example of a knowledge graph from my Obsidian, which is very similar to Roam in creating and managing your ideas.
One interesting aspect of these visual graphs and cognitive mapping is how this can be used in the academic sphere.
Take a look at this website Connected papers where it can create a graph for you of similar papers on a certain subject.
Once you learn how to use this, it will definitely change how you compile your workflow and improve your search and think in a visual manner finding more connections and help you better search your topic.
Further Reading:
The Theory underlying concept maps and how to construct them
Mind map mastery By Tony Buzan
Mind maps: quicker notes, better memory and improved learning by Kam Knight
The perfect Mind map: 6 Steps Checklist video Tutorial by Justin Sung
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