112 Map for Creativity …

The Creative Gorilla #112 Use Mind Mapping to help you find solutions… “Creativity is the development of original ideas, concepts and solutions using imagination and association – this is the premise of the mind map.” Tony Buzan, with Chris Griffiths, in Mind Maps for Business   Would you like to enhance your solution finding?   Next week, we are taking our children to Germany, to see our football team Fulham play Wolfsburg in the quarterfinals of the Europa League. This is our first ever match abroad and yesterday we went on line to a route planning web site to find out how to drive there. I looked at the detailed list of instructions, which didn’t help much to get an overview. Next I viewed the interactive map but after a minute or so of fiddling, I confess I borrowed my son’s atlas and in a few seconds was able to use my imagination to visualise the route and association to work out the rough distance to three nearby towns for potential hotels. Having obtained a sense of relief at confirming our travel details, I was delighted too that this atlas, with its very clear visualisation and structure, gave me a useful introduction to this article, imagination and association being at the core of how Mind Maps work. I recently attended a course led by Tony Buzan and others, to become a licensed Buzan Mind Mapping instructor and thought I would share how we can use Mind Maps for, amongst many other things, creativity.  Many of you will know the concept of left and right brain, the left side of...

Mind Mapping

I recently attended a course led by Tony Buzan and others, to become a licensed Buzan Mind Mapping instructor and thought I would share how we can use Mind Maps for, amongst many other things, creativity.  Many of you will know the concept of left and right brain, the left side of the cerebral cortex dealing with words, analysis, logic etc, and the right side dealing with rhythm, colour, imagination etc. The implication of this description is that there is no connection between the two sides, which is not true; they are joined by the corpus callosum, a sort of superconductor for swapping information. If you ask people, “Where does creativity lie in the brain?” they will typically say, “On the right”. Ask them what side of the brain Mind Mapping uses and they will typically say the right. This is wrong. In fact, the process of creating a Mind Map uses the whole brain, creating many associations as your imagination creates more ideas and branches, but also structuring and ordering those ideas. So How can you use a Mind Map for creativity? Here is a summarised version, for a full version, please buy Tony Buzan’s book. Rapid Mind Map Burst Think of your topic. On a landscape A3 page, draw a strong central image of your topic Allow your brain to associate and imagine everything associated with that topic for around twenty minutes, noting each idea on branches and sub branches radiating from the central image. Go fast and avoid censoring yourself Reconstruct and Revise -1 Take a short break to rest the brain Make a new Mind...

73 Map Your Thoughts

YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 73 Mapping your thoughts is a good place to start when your creativity falters…                    “I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here’ written all over it.” Steven Wright, US Comedian Do you need to unblock your creative pipes? People sometimes ask me if I ever run out of ideas for Gorilla articles. Last week I thought it had happened. We were on holiday in Venice, a perfect place I thought, to get creative ideas for a Gorilla article. I had five “triggers”, the first being the picture on my mobile phone changing from the Houses of Parliament to the Leaning Tower of Pisa as I switched it on in Venice airport (what a lovely idea!). Normally, I sense a trigger and mentally fit it to a suitable concept for an article, but I couldn’t fit any of these five. I had a creative block and needed a creative plumber to free it (and before you say it, help me tap in to my creativity). Then my wife bought me a lovely notebook (Moleskine brand) which I promptly used to map out all the triggers in the form of a Mind Map. (If you are unfamiliar with mapping, here is a link to give you some background) Mapping my thoughts helped me find a connection, but I’ll write about that in the next article, because I realised as I mapped that my mental block was a trigger and mapping is the article concept! When I got home I did a search on all of...