Mind Mapping For Dummies

Taking notes from presentations and discussions

This application of Mind Mapping’s based on a similar principle. With Mind Mapping you can glean important information from discussions and presentations easily and, above all, very quickly. The essential thing about Mind Mapping – and its great strength – is that you can organise content thematically and not necessarily in the chronological order of a discussion or presentation. This means that, instead of writing down all the information sequentially as you would when taking ordinary notes, you can add new information flexibly to the Mind Map at any time in a way that makes thematic sense. This is particularly useful in unstructured discussions and presentations. In Chapter 7 you’ll learn how effective notes can be taken in lectures and discussions and practise this technique.

Assistance with study

During both my undergraduate and postgraduate study I organised my notes and book excerpts in the form of Mind Maps, sometimes with pen and paper and sometimes with the software available at the time. All these Mind Maps are scanned and stored on my computer and are accessible to me in digital format. Even years after completing my studies it can often happen that I’d like to look up a topic that I covered at that time and clarify an issue relating to it. In this way Mind Maps that I made then are still extremely useful to me today. Without having to search through the details of texts and pages of notes I can conjure up all the required ...