Want to learn better? Start mind mapping | Hazel Wagner | TEDxNaperville

[Music] mind mapping is a method by which you can make notes take notes and help your memory because you're working in a way that helps your brain instead of gets in the way i spent most of my life worrying about whether i was going to remember things i had parents who had wonderful memories and other people in my family and mine wasn't so i went to college four degrees including a phd in mathematics obviously i spent lots of time listening to lectures i made thousands and thousands of pages of notes i worried so much that

i would forget something that i felt like i had to write everything but whether you hand write it like i did which ended up with a callous on my finger or you type it you're still just transcribing you're not thinking about what you're hearing or reading you're not organizing it the way your brain needs to organize it so that it will remember it better so that you can learn it store it and then retrieve it when you want to and that's really important being able to retrieve it so also when you are writing so fast

typing so fast you're not paying lots of attention and all of a sudden people around me would laugh and i go what did he say what did she say because i'd missed it you're not really hearing everything you can't write as fast as someone speaks so this is a mind map this is a handwritten mind map it's the kind that i recommend to most people to do it's much better to do them at least when you're first learning but even later with just a plain piece of paper and a pencil or a pen the idea

is that you are doing something very visual you're also using kinesthetic you are using your hands your arms you're thinking about this whole thing as you're going you're developing something that starts in the center and builds out radially so in the center goes the topic it could be the name of someone you're listening to it could be the title of a book it could be a question that you're trying to brainstorm and then you build out just free form and you only put down what's important to you so each person's mind map even of the

same talk of the same book will be very different because what you want to remember what's important to you is going to be different than someone else and that's wonderful it's very personal and notice also you all you put down single words or short phrases this isn't whole sentences or paragraphs do you think you store in your brain paragraphs how about sentences what about those outlines you know you spent a lot of time in school roman numeral 1 a b c remember that stuff do you think that's what you store in your brain i don't

think so you store images you store key ideas you store the connections between the things you're learning and things you already knew so shortly after i finished my fourth degree i learned about this thing called mind mapping i had never heard of it before this as you can see is a piece of a mind map in fact it's the part of the mind map of my talk but there i was learning about it for the first time and first i felt great regret because boy would that have saved me time and helped me a lot

when i was taking notes and trying to learn things and especially getting ready for tests or being able to tell somebody else about what i heard and then i started to get angry how come i never came across this before how come nobody had ever shown me this thing called mind mapping and as i researched it i found that there were places around the world where things were being talked about in england they were doing a lot of it and in australia but we hadn't heard very much about it here and i finally felt very

grateful that i had finally because it works like the brain works my research published way back in 1975 proved how important the visual and kinesthetic is to people understanding mathematics and now i had found a tool to apply in all kinds of curricula and all kinds of subjects not just mathematics so we need to be able to do something to help our brain to work with our brain rather than against it and the way a mind map works it's compact it's all on one page you only write keywords or short phrases but those trigger words

those key words trigger for you the bigger idea so you learn to pay attention to what you're reading or what you're hearing and write down what's most important so it triggers the bigger idea so later when you want to think about it and talk about it you can easily do it i was attracted because of what it does for academia but i used it all the years in business too every meeting every meeting with a customer every sales meeting everyone that you go to fantastic way to take notes and to explain it to someone else

so here is how it works you take a piece of paper horizontally the reason it's horizontal is so that while you're writing and while you're reading the word most of the words are facing the way we usually read by the way it shouldn't have lines but if you can't find a piece of paper without lines then don't worry about it just put it horizontal and ignore the lines write down key words write down short phrases and very important the connections between these things you build out radially so in the center is the topic or the

name or the person or the question and you build out completely free form writing doing your branches and writing what's on it whatever works for you and sometimes there was a subject you were paying attention to and writing something on one branch and suddenly later something else comes up or you think of something you go back and add it to that branch completely free form again very personal the way it works for you so you can go back to looking at it you are thinking you're not blindly documented you're not blindly transcribing something you're thinking

about how does it fit together how does it work and how will i remember it when i need to so i'm going to give you a couple of examples and i think it'll help you really understand how this works and i chose ted examples because i think you might be familiar with it the first example i thought i'd share with you is dan barber's talk about how i fell in love with a fish now here is the way i would have done it the old-fashioned way right i would have written everything down line after line

just following what he said and how would i explain that to someone else i have to read the whole thing how would i find a particular point that i wanted to remember i again i have to read the whole thing just like studying and going back through the exactly the same things you heard the first time but here is the mind map of dan barber's talk how i fell in love with a fish so if you look at the branches here first he was a chef and he certainly served a lot of fish and he

fell in love with a particular fish because he understood it was sustainable and he did a little more research and he found out that they were feeding the fish 30 percent chicken and he decided ah it's not sustainable and he fell out of love with that fish so later he tasted a fish that was overcooked and still delicious he fell in love with fish too and this fish was so amazing that he even ate the skin which he said he never did before because it was delicious and he went to talk to miguel miguel was

the person who he understood ran the fish farm and miguel said i don't really run a fish farm i run a sanctuary for birds and there are lots of fish there and i don't have to bring any food for the fish it's all natural they just eat what they naturally eat and the water is clean and everything so dan barber learned a lot about this and learned a lot about agriculture and has recommendations on it but what was most important about his talk is that i noticed he asked questions really really good questions and it

was the questions who gave that gave him the insights he asked questions about what is sustainability he asked the question how could an overcooked foot fish taste this good how could a fish that is overcooked tastes this good and then he asked why do flamingos fly so far for their food so it was about the questions they are what helped him understand the whole issue and then be able to share it with us and you see a mind map allows me to explain it to you you can follow what i am saying let's do another

one sir ken robinson has done a number of talks he talked about creativity in schools and claims that schools are killing creativity and here again is my little hand done mind map and i do recommend that when people are first learning them they do that but you'll find even later even after you get really good at it just grabbing a piece of paper and a pencil that's handy at the moment you want to take notes you'll do that all the time you won't have to worry about doing it so in any special form but of

course when you want other people to read your handwriting sometimes it's not so good i admit that so i do put it sometimes into a computer program and there are lots of them and that allows other people to read it as well so ken robinson is the one who talked about creativity in school and he said that the problem the good thing about children is that children aren't afraid to be wrong and so therefore they're more creative but we kind of schooled some of that out of them he also had some wonderful quotes that i

wanted to remember one of his quotes had to do with the fact that if insects were gone he said all life would be over but if humans were gone the rest of life would flourish i thought that was pretty good and i wanted to make sure i remembered it so it's one of my branches he also talked ab about the use of jokes and he had lots of jokes in his talk and there were so many jokes and i also wanted to keep track of some of them so i put a branch out there for

jokes that i wanted to remember one of them was imagine for a moment that you're an english teacher and you have nine year old shakespeare in your class how are you going to handle that right so here i have a mind map where i showed what was important to me in his talk and being able to do that on a mind map allows you to be able to pay attention to just what you want write down just the things that you care about and there they are ready for you to explain and he wanted creativity

at the top of the pyramid along with literacy and i'm reminded of that when i look at the mind map so what about you maybe you're feeling a little angry too if you have never heard of this before maybe you're thinking you could have been helping your brain all along or maybe you knew about this a bit but never really paid attention and learned to use it it takes some practice anything new that you do takes some practice so i challenge you now to practice using mind mapping and you'll really be helping your brain i

have one last little uh story or anecdote to share with you and that is that some years ago i was asked to help my young granddaughter who was not doing well in social studies and i went over to help her and i showed her how to mind map and she mind mapped the chapter about the us government and the next day she got an a the first a she'd ever gotten in social studies it was very exciting so two days ago i called her and i asked her hey do you remember that day i came

over and showed you mind mapping and she said i sure do we had all these colored pens and we drew this picture and i really understood that chapter and i did very well on the test the next day and i kept using it in school especially in high school so i challenge you not only for you to practice mind mapping and learn it better but share it with some others when you do that you will internalize it better and be able to use it better teach someone else and especially teach some children to use mind

mapping thank you