Here is the full text and summary of power brainstorming expert Hazel Wagner’s talk: Want to Learn Better? Start Mind Mapping at TEDxNaperville conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Hazel Wagner – Power Brainstorming Expert
Mind mapping is a method by which you can make notes, take notes, and help your memory, because you’re working in a way that helps your brain instead of gets in the way.
I spent most of my life worrying about whether I was going to remember things. I had parents who had wonderful memories, and other people in my family, and mine wasn’t.
So I went to college, four degrees, including a Ph.D. in mathematics. Obviously I spent lots of time listening to lectures. I made thousands and thousands of pages of notes. I worried so much that I would forget something that I felt like I had to write everything.
But whether you hand write it, like I did which ended up with a callous on my finger, or you type it, you’re still just transcribing. You’re not thinking about what you’re hearing or reading; you’re not organizing it the way your brain needs to organize it, so that it will remember it better, so that you can learn it, store it, and then retrieve it when you want to.
And that’s really important: being able to retrieve it.
So also when you are writing so fast, typing so fast, you’re not paying lots of attention. And all of a sudden people around me would laugh, and I’d go: What did he say? What did she say? because I’d missed it. You’re not really hearing everything. You can’t write as fast as someone speaks.
So this is a mind map. This is a handwritten mind map. It’s the kind that I recommend to most people to do. It’s much better to do them at least when you’re first learning, but even later with just a plain piece of paper and a pencil or a pen.
The idea is that you are doing something very visual. You’re also using kinesthetic… you are using your hands, your arms, you’re thinking about this whole thing as you’re going. You’re developing something that starts in the center and builds out radially.
So in the center goes the topic. It could be the name of someone you’re listening to. It could be the title of a book. It could be a question that you’re trying to brainstorm. And then you build out just free form and you only put down what’s important to you. So each person’s mind map, even of the same talk, of the same book, will be very different, because what you want to remember, what’s important to you is going to be different than someone else.
And that’s wonderful. It’s very personal.
And notice also, you put down single words or short phrases. This isn’t whole sentences or paragraphs. Do you think you store in your brain paragraphs? How about sentences? What about those outlines? You know you spent a lot of time in school, roman numeral 1, a, b, c… remember that stuff. Do you think that’s what you store in your brain? I don’t think so.
You store images. You store key ideas. You store the connections between the things you’re learning and things you already knew.
So shortly after I finished my fourth degree, I learned about this thing called Mind Mapping. I had never heard of it before.
This as you can see is a piece of a mind map. In fact, it’s the part of the mind map of my talk. But there I was learning about it for the first time. And first I felt great regret because boy, would that have saved me time and helped me a lot when I was taking notes and trying to learn things and especially getting ready for tests, or being able to tell somebody else about what I heard.
And then I started to get angry: how come I never came across this before? How come nobody had ever shown me this thing called mind mapping?
And as I researched it, I found that there were places around the world where things were being talked about. In England, they were doing a lot of it and in Australia, but we hadn’t heard very much about it here.
And I finally felt very grateful that I had finally, because it works like the brain works.
My research published way back in 1975 proved how important the visual and kinesthetic is to people understanding mathematics. And now I had found a tool to apply in all kinds of curricula and all kinds of subjects, not just mathematics.
So we need to be able to do something to help our brain to work with our brain, rather than against it. And the way a Mind Map works it’s compact, it’s all on one page. You only write keywords or short phrases. But those trigger words, those keywords trigger for you the bigger idea. So you learn to pay attention to what you’re reading or what you’re hearing and write down what’s most important so it triggers the bigger idea.
So later when you want to think about it and talk about it, you can easily do it. I was attracted because of what it does for academia, but I used it all the years in business too: every meeting… every meeting with a customer, every sales meeting, everyone that you go to. Fantastic way to take notes and to explain it to someone else.
So here is how it works. You take a piece of paper horizontally. The reason it’s horizontal is so that while you’re writing and while you’re reading, most of the words are facing the way we usually read.
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