by John Brooker | Apr 23, 2012 | Tools
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...
