href="#fb3_img_img_5bfb3478-c5bf-5d3f-b456-c7a678f16664.jpg" alt="image"/> Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist
You are in good company! Indeed, it is thought by many that the entire Italian Renaissance was generated for the most part by great creative geniuses who escaped from their linear-thinking prisons. They made their thoughts and ideas visible, not only through lines and words, but also with the equally and often more powerful language of images, drawings, diagrams, codes, symbols, and graphs.
THE BEST WAY TO MAKE THOUGHTS VISIBLE
The reason why these great creative geniuses used a powerful language of images to organize, develop, and remember their thoughts is because the brain has a natural aptitude for visual recognition – it is, in fact, practically perfect. This is why you are much more likely to remember information when you use images to represent it.
There have been many studies to prove this. For example, in one study adults were shown 2,560 photographic slides at the rate of one every 10 seconds. They were then shown 280 pairs of slides, one of which they had already seen, the other of which they had not. The adults had an 85–95 per cent success rate of correctly identifying the slides they had already seen.
Mind Maps use your brain’s talent for visual recognition to great effect. With their combination of colour, image, and curving branches, they are much more visually stimulating than conventional note-taking methods, which tend to be linear and monochrome. This makes it extremely easy to recall information from a Mind Map.
Mind Mappers in History
LEONARDO DA VINCI
For a perfect example of a great creative genius using the language of vision to generate thousands of brilliant groundbreaking ideas, you just have to take a look at the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo used images, diagrams, symbols, and illustrations as the purest way to capture, on paper, the thoughts that were teeming in his brain. At the heart of Leonardo’s notebooks, which, because of the manifestations of the sheer creative genius that they contain, are among the most valuable books in the world, are his drawings. These drawings helped Leonardo to explore his thinking in fields as far ranging as art, physiology, engineering, aquanautics, and biology.
For Leonardo the language of words took second place to the language of images, and was used to label, indicate, or describe his creative thoughts and discoveries – the prime tool for his creative thinking was the language of images.
GALILEO GALILEI
Galileo was another of the world’s great creative-thinking geniuses, who, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, helped to revolutionize science by using his own note-taking techniques. While his contemporaries were using traditional verbal and mathematical approaches to the analysis of scientific problems, Galileo made his thoughts visible, like Leonardo, with illustrations and diagrams.
Interestingly, Galileo was, like Leonardo, a great daydreamer. According to the now famous ‘Legend of the Lamp’, Galileo was idly watching the gentle swaying to-and-fro of the lamps hanging in Pisa Cathedral when he had a ‘Eureka’ experience. Galileo realized that no matter what the range of a lamp’s swing, it always required the same time to complete an oscillation. Galileo developed this observation of ‘isochronism’ into his Law of the Pendulum, applying it to time-keeping and the development of the pendulum clock.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, realized as a young man that imagination and visualization were the most vital part of the creative-thinking process. As such he played imagination games, and taught himself to draw.
Like Galileo, Feynman broke away from his more traditional note-taking contemporaries, and decided to put the entire theory of quantum electrodynamics into freshly visual and diagrammatic form. This led to his developing the now famous Feynman diagrams – pictorial representation of particle interaction, which are now used throughout the world by students to help them understand, remember, and create ideas in the realms of physics and general science.
Feynman was so proud of his diagrams that he painted them on his car!
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Albert Einstein, the brain of the 20th century, also rejected the traditional standard linear, numerical, and verbal forms of creative thinking. Like Leonardo and Galileo before him, Einstein believed that these tools were useful but not necessary, and that imagination was far more important.
Einstein stated that: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge, for imagination is limitless.’ Indeed, in a letter to his friend Maurice Solovine, he explained his difficulty in using words to express his philosophy of science, because he did not think in such ways; he thought more diagrammatically and schematically.
To start your exploration, imagine that your brain is a newly built and empty library waiting to be filled with data and information in the form of books, videos, films, CDs, and DVDs.
You are the chief librarian and have to choose first whether you wish to have a small or a large selection. You naturally choose a large selection.
Your second choice is whether to have the information organized or not. Imagine that you take the second option, not to have it organized: you simply order a cartload of books and electronic media, and have it all piled in a giant heap of information in the middle of your library floor!
When somebody comes into your library and asks for a specific book or place where they can find information on a specific topic, you shrug your shoulders and say: ‘It’s somewhere there in the pile, hope you find it – good luck!’
This metaphor describes the state of most people’s minds. Their minds, even though they may – and often do – contain the information they want, are so horribly disorganized that it is impossible for them to retrieve that information when they need it. This leads to frustration and a reluctance to take in or handle any new information. After all, what is the point of taking in new information, if you are never going to be able to access the stuff anyway?!
Imagine, on the other hand, that you have a giant library, filled with incredible amounts of information on everything you ever wanted to know. In this new super-library, rather than all this information being piled randomly in the middle of the floor, everything is filed in perfect order, exactly where you want it.
In addition to this, the library has a phenomenal data-retrieval and access system that enables you to find anything you want at the flash of a thought.
An impossible dream?
An immediate possibility for you!
Mind Maps are that phenomenal storage, data-retrieval, and access system for the gigantic library that actually exists
