it remains one of the most powerful means available for remembering vast
quantities of information. Every use of Mind Maps covered in this chapter
strengthens your memory in some way, from embedding the key points of a text
in your brain in order to revise for an exam or write an essay, to remembering all
the things you need to achieve over the coming week and reminding yourself to
exercise and eat well.
We have seen how important the power of association is in the formation of a
Mind Map: when combined with imagination, it feeds and waters the branches
of the Mind Map, encouraging them to radiate organically from the central
image. In addition to this, association acts as a key to memory itself.
In 1969, American cognitive scientists Allan M. Collins and M. Ross Quillian
tested the way in which memories are organized for efficient enquiry, allowing
us to dip into our memory banks without a moment’s hesitation. They found that
our semantic memory (a way in which we make sense of the world through logic
and language) is organized like a library of sorts, with interrelated categories or
nodes representing specific features or concepts, which are then connected to
one another.
Our individual experiences shape these connections, which means that
everybody has their own spider’s web of associations: for example, “bird” is
connected to “flight” is connected to “sky”. A Mind Map works in harmony with
this process by taking a subject and then using imagination and association to
link together everything the Mind Mapper knows about it.
The individual nature of our semantic networks is one reason why a Mind Map
is inevitably such a personal creation: to get the most out of one and to improve
your chances of memorizing the information in it, you will have to create your
own Mind Map rather than rely on one that has been made by somebody else.
This is one reason why I personally prefer hand-drawn Mind Maps to digital
versions, useful though those can be. It can also be slightly more difficult to
understand someone else’s Mind Map, as the way that person associates and
links information may not be the same as yours, and that slight difficulty will
make the Mind Map less useful to you.
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