Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a technique invented by Tony Buzan who is a psychologist and has written many books about the mind and memory.

Mind mapping allows you to think "radially" and frees the mind to explore different ideas. It's extremely easy to learn and can help you with organising information, brainstorming for ideas, outlining, summarising, and in general, learning.

I was introduced to mind mapping by my boss and I read Joyce Wycoff's book (Mindmapping : Your Personal Guide to Exploring Creativity and Problem-Solving) that was really enjoyable and provides an excellent overview and introduction to mind-mapping. I have a mind-map of her book to help me remember what I learnt!

Here are a couple of articles that give an introduction to mind mapping: Mind Mapping in eight simple steps and How to mind map (Tony Buzan).

For those of you that like to use the computer for everything, there's a really neat (free) software called Free Mind that you can use for mind-mapping. You need the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run it though. It's better to learn mind mapping first before using this tool though.

Go ahead, free your mind.