The cerebral cortex is the part in your brain that is responsible for intellectual skills.  The intellectual skills include logical abilities, identifying lines, colors, numbers, words, day dreaming, rhythm and spatial sound differentiation (this is what makes you appreciate Dolby and THX sound effects). These get categorized into the visual or the auditory senses accordingly. The visual sense is so powerful that most of the association happens through this.  For those who are visually impaired, the other senses become sharper and powerful and usually it is the auditory sense that gets in charge. So how does the brain associate? Brain constantly learns once you are born. And it learns consciously and unconsciously.

All the intellectual information helps in building shape, structure, look and feel, composture, the feeling of everything you come across life.  These information are linked like a foreign key relationship to the primary object in focus. It is an extremely powerful relational management and fetching of information is so fast and amazing that you cant even think of super computers performing that fast.  So Mind Maps is all about utilizing this amazing association capability that is built in in you which you never realized and used it to maximum.  Mind maps are for anyone who wants to utilize this powerful feature and is not restricted by cast, creed, religion, sex or where you belong.

Mind maps has been my favorite since my school days. It helped me learn stuff easily and more than learning it helped me remember what I learnt. This wonderful tool helps you capture your thoughts in a creative fashion that will help you remember and act upon it whenever you want. A mind map is a diagram consisting of nodes in the form of a tree spread across a sheet of paper. The brain learns in an associative fashion linking various senses (visual, auditory, touch and so on). This associative learning helps in storing and remembering information again associatively. The more you associate with various senses more chances are that you will remember what you learnt for a longer period of time.

For example you could think of a friend whenever you see a restaurant or have a delicacy that you both had when he/she was with you in a restaurant. Your brain has associated your friend’s image with the perception and view of the restaurant, with the look and taste of a particular food. If this associative information is recalled very often, the brain marks it as a useful information and leaves a lasting impact. When you can simulate a way to denote this association and forcefully look at it few times you will remember what is there and reproduce it any time. This is very effective than writing down your thoughts and reading it. We will see more about it in the coming posts.