mind maps have been around there are many ways to do it there's lots of science that supports it smartest people in the world swear by it but the truth is it's a difficult skill to do i was doing it wrong for a while even during medical school but the system i'm about to share makes it really simple and i'm going to demonstrate using an advanced medical topic just to prove that even if you don't know anything about the subject that mind mapping can still help us learn the most complex concepts and by the end of
this video we are going from a blank page to complete mind map so first of all just understanding why we mind map actually helps us better with execution the process of mind mapping helps us understand the topic better and second the product which is the mind map itself helps us remember better it's a great study guide for review if we compare mind maps versus traditional notes mind maps are better for a view because they are expressive they use visuals analogies abstractions and associations a picture is worth a thousand words right it would take me a
lot longer to read through these paragraphs of notes whereas i could look at this and instantly remember what the whole topic was about so that's the remembering side but what about the understanding side well i can see how every single detail relates back to the big picture this is easy to understand because it's related to this which is caused by this etc so compare that to learning with flash cards which are isolated information i can't see my thought process right this makes the big picture harder to understand so everything we just went over is covered
in our mind map acronym called tree thought process relationships expressive and efficient get it my maps are trees cajun koi academy trains rangers rangers protect forest you get the picture hey misty can you activate the mind map protocol initiating mind map protocol step number one prepare a list of key terms so for this example i'm going to mind map nephropathology which is basically the study of kidney disease and here is my list of terms that i got from lecture step number two outline the terms so i'm going to figure out which are the main topics
and which are the subtopics and this step really used to trip me up because i used to try to mind map all the terms at once and i would just end up with this really messy mind map that looks something like this which is basically useless for review so we want to identify the main concepts because those will be the trunk of our tree which will later be giving a structure to the rest of the map step number three is plot the main topics on the page so i'm writing all the topics on the page
here and i'm leaving plenty of room in between so i can draw all sorts of relationships and arrows and stuff for step number four this is where the tree acronym starts to kick in so in this step we find the thought process how do these main topics fit together logically like imagine that these are all individual puzzle pieces and we're trying to fit them together to see the big picture i found that a good trick is to ask how do these key terms relate to each other are they similar or different can i compare and
contrast them is one a cause or effect of another are these parts of a bigger hole when it asks these relationships it automatically implies that i gotta know the definitions of these terms so let's go through some of them acute kidney injury this is basically a type of kidney damage that happens abruptly that happen like within a short period of time for example if i took a drug that i'm allergic to and it causes kidney damage within a few hours i would say that i got aki from a drug allergy alright let's look at the
next one chronic kidney disease this is basically another type of kidney damage we see that there is a relationship between ckd and aki they're both types of kidney damage if i compare and contrast them i find that the difference here is that ckd takes place over a long period of time typically years so both are types of kidney damage aki is short time frame ckd is long time frame next is end stage renal disease this is also another type of kidney damage but this one has been happening for so long the kidneys basically don't even
work anymore so the thought process i'm realizing here is that kidney damage occurs on a time spectrum aki to ckd to esrd so i can visually depict this process by maybe drawing a spectrum and labeling it zero to a hundred a hundred percent working zero percent working so the thought process is clear and now i might be able to group all the rest of the key terms onto the my map based on this thought process based on timing overall this makes the big picture a lot easier to understand for me step number five find the
relationships so this kind of goes hand in hand with the previous thought process step we've basically already found the relationships between the main topics but that's okay let's try to find some more so i could group these other key terms according to the time frame some diseases tend to cause persistent damage over years for example if you have diabetes and you don't treat it then it'll just keep causing kidney disease for years and years but if you have something like an infection causing kidney disease and you treat that infection within a few days and the
kidneys usually get better pretty quickly so i could group these other key terms by relationship of timing but i was reading a little more i found another relationship that might be even more useful so in general the whole kidney system looks something like this we have the kidneys which are responsible for filtering our blood so it picks out the good stuff to keep in our bodies and it picks out the bad stuff that we just pee away into the toilet as urine so blood coming in urine coming out into the toilet this whole thing in
itself is another thought process that comes about while i was reading so it's more memorable to me and so all these other terms cause damage somewhere along this pathway so the relationship here is location all right to spare you the time i'm just gonna quickly fill them in but for example this disease typically happens here damaging the kidney cells itself this disease typically happens further upstream causing less blood supply and basically starving the kidneys and this disease typically happens further downstream in the form of a blockage that causes everything to just back up like traffic
and causes total mayhem so even if i had no idea what some of these key terms mean like renal calculus is that some kind of mathematical equation for kidneys i don't know but i can figure it out i would at least know that it causes disease in this location of the system and the treatment for all diseases in this general location is the same you got to remove the blockage that's why relationships are so important it helps you figure things out now for those of you wondering real calculus means kidney stones stones block urine from
coming out stuff backs up kidney stones are extremely painful because our body is trying to squeeze a giant stone through a tiny tube and it hurts the solution is to remove the blockage with medicine or surgery or laser or whatever step number six is to be expressive so i'm looking for ways to express ideas in the form of visuals or analogies so instead of writing renal calculus is the formation of hard deposits that obstruct and cause congestion of the ureter treatment of large severe urolothiasis includes lithotripsy versus nephrolithotomy versus blah blah blah like how long
does that take to read and review right so instead i've expressed it as a visual makes it so much easier to review but being expressive with mind maps seems obvious yet we have a lot of students making mind maps like this and this i'm personally not a fan i would invest a little more time up front to deeply think about these concepts and what they're about and possibly find some kind of analogy to my favorite anime or marvel movie or something i want to express all my ideas visually step number seven is make our mind
map as efficient to review as possible so to do this let's revisit all the other parts of the tree acronym and make them all efficient for review so first is thought process i want to make sure that i can easily see the flow of ideas because when i look at my mind map my eyes should know exactly where the starting point is i don't want to waste my time trying to decipher my own mind map like look at this mind map it's kind of hard to tell where the thought process is and reviewing it would
be really inefficient i want to be able to see a clear line of reason so maybe make the arrows thicker and bolder or make the main concepts really stick out like here's a spectrum of damage and here's a flow of process next is relationships i can efficiently see the relationships between the ideas one way to make it more obvious is by using color coding or highlighting so for example damage upstream is red damage to the kidney itself is blue and then damage downstream is yellow red indicating the kitten getting less blood and yellow for urine
you see how i'm abstracting right there so another way to make relationships more efficient to review is to try to group together as much info as possible you don't want to have like 10 different things coming out of one point so for example i've already grouped all these kidney diseases by location in the entire system but let's say what if i had like 10 different diseases here that cause damage to the kidney itself you know that's way too many so i would do my best to find a way to group it even further i'd have
to look for even more relationships and if i do a little more reading i'd find that i can group the diseases by the type of kidney cell that they damage within the kidney so like glomeruli tubules interstitial etc a general rule of thumb is that i try not to have more than three to four branches coming off at any one point and then finally expressive which i've probably talked about enough by this point visuals are more efficient to review than text a trick that i love doing is to pack a lot of info into one
image for example if i have to memorize a bunch of details about a disease like if this disease causes you to have moon faces red urine peticule rash and i don't know camel hump then memorizing this list would be difficult if it's all words but if i draw a picture that depicts all those details then not only does it instantly become more memorable it makes review much more efficient so this whole process took me about an hour or so to do including all the reading and trying to figure out important relationships which is totally worth
it if i compare it to the hours of review i would save if i used this efficient study guide plus the hours of relearning i might have to do if i didn't understand the relationships and thought process the first time around there are many ways to my map this is what i prefer but let me know in the comments if you found this helpful or super confusing and if you want to check out more learning and study skills then check out this video right here [Music] you
