The Insider Secret On Visual Mind Mapping Uncovered

: Image via Wikipedia

You may wonder what, exactly, might be meant by visual mind mapping. After all, aren’t all mind maps visual in some way or other? Surely that’s supposed to be the point, that thoughts and ideas are connected in a more visual, diagrammatic way than when they are written in paragraphs, left to right, in a very linear, ordered, and one-directional style. Aren’t all mind mapping techniques designed to break out of that left-brain type of thought pattern and introduce a more organic, right-brain, visual way of relating ideas to each other?

This is basically true. Yet some mindmap software does seem more “visual” than others, and some groups still prefer something that reflects a more linear style, even in a mind map. For example, when Tony Buzan and Chris Griffiths produced their “iMindMap” software in 2006, many business people criticized it for looking too “cartoon-like” with its colors and wavy branches connecting the concepts. This type of visual mind mapping, in their opinion, had gone too far down the “organic” road to be usable in a business meeting. As a result, “iMindMap” now has one mode that business people can switch into without the colors, something that more closely reflects the “flowchart” style so beloved by conservative businesses over the years.

Every mind mapping program seems to stand at some point on a spectrum running from a quite linear flowchart style at one end to a lushly colored pictorial style at the other. The program called Gliffy (www.gliffy.com) would be placed more toward the “flowchart” end, with its organized, straight, parallel lines and reduced color scheme. But the software called NovaMind (www.novamind.com) stands proudly at the opposite end of that spectrum, as a distinctly visual mind mapping kind of program, with jewel-colored branches gleaming against a black background.

There seems to be an ongoing tension between the two; the more visual mind mapping style and one that is tugged back toward the more linear, flow chart style of long tradition. This tension may reflect the actual difficulty that was addressed by the development of these mind tools in the first place; the need to break out of the standard linear, sequential mode and allow a more visual mode to expand people’s ways of dealing with knowledge. Still, even using a flowchart mode, the ideas are being presented in a pictorial style, and may still allow some new relationships of ideas to be discovered. This, according to mind mapping enthusiasts, is at least a step in the right direction.