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

Mind

mapping

is a method by which you can take notes, take notes, and help your memory because you are working in a way that helps your brain instead of hindering the way I spent most of my life worrying if I was going to remember things. I had parents who had wonderful memories and other people in my family and mine didn't, so I went to university with four degrees, including a PhD in mathematics, obviously, I spent a lot of time listening to lectures. I took thousands and thousands of pages of notes. It worried me. So much so that I was forgetting something that I felt like I had to write it all down, but whether you write it by hand like I did, which ended up with a callus on my finger, or you write it down, you're still transcribing, you're not thinking about what you're doing. by listening or reading you're not organizing it the way your brain needs to organize it so that it remembers it

better

, so that you can

learn

it, store it and then retrieve it whenever you

want

and that's really important. to get it back, so also when you type so fast, you type so fast that you're not paying much attention and all of a sudden people around me were laughing and I was like, what did he say? what did she say? because she had missed it. "You're not really listening to everything, you can't type as fast as someone speaks, so this is a

mind

map, this is a handwritten

mind

map, it's the kind I recommend to most people, it's much

better

to do it at the less when you're there." First you're

learn

ing, but even later with just a simple piece of paper and a pencil or pen, the idea is that you're doing something very visual, you're also using kinesthetic, you're using your hands, your arms, you're thinking about all of this.

As you go, you are developing something that

start

s in the center and develops radially, so that in the center goes the topic, it could be the name of someone you are 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 free form and only write what's important to you, so each person's mind map, even from the same talk from the same book, will be very different because what What you

want

to remember is what is important to you is going to be different from another person and that is wonderful, it is very personal and also pay attention to everything you write with single words or short phrases, these are not complete sentences or paragraphs.

Do you think you store paragraphs in your brain? How about prayers? What about those schemes? You know you spent a lot of time in school Roman numeral 1 a b c Remember those things Do you think that's what you store in your brain? I don't believe it. You store images. You store key ideas. You store the connections between the. things you're learning and things you already knew, shortly after finishing my fourth grade, I learned about this thing called mind

mapping

. I had never heard of it before, as you can see, it is a part of a mind map, in fact, it is the part. of the mind map from my talk, but there I was learning about it for the first time and I first felt a big regret because that would have saved me time and helped me a lot when I was taking notes and trying to learn things and especially learning. be ready for exams or be able to tell someone else what I heard and then I

start

ed getting angry, how come I have never encountered this before?

How come no one had ever shown me this thing called a mind map and as I was researching I discovered that there were places around the world where things were being talked about in England, they were doing it a lot and in Australia, but we hadn't heard much about it here and finally I felt very grateful to have done it because it works like the brain. The works that my research published back in 1975 demonstrated how important the visual and the kinesthetic are for people to understand mathematics and now I had found a tool to apply in all types of curricula and all types of subjects, not just in mathematics, so we should be able to do it. something that helps our brain work with our brain instead of against it and the way a mind map works is compact it's all on one page you just write keywords or short phrases but those trigger words those keywords trigger for you the bigger idea so that you can learn to pay attention to what you're reading or what you're listening to and write down what's most important so that it triggers the bigger idea, so that later when you want to think about it and talk about it, you can do it easily.

I was drawn to it because of what it does for academia, but I also used it every year in business, every meeting, every client meeting, every sales meeting, everyone you go to, a fantastic way to take notes and explain it to someone else, so that's how it works. take a sheet of paper horizontally, the reason it's horizontal is so that as you write and as you read the word, most of the words are oriented the way we normally read, by the way, it shouldn't have lines, but if You can If you can't find a piece of paper without lines, then don't worry, just lay it horizontally and ignore the lines.

Write keywords. Write short sentences and, very important, you build the connections between these things radially, so that he is in the center. topic or the name or the person or the question and you construct a completely free form writing by making your branches and writing what's in them, whatever works for you and sometimes there was a topic that you were paying attention to and writing something in a branch and suddenly later something else comes up or you think of something, you go back and add it to that branch completely free again, very personal, the way it works for you, so you can see it again, you're thinking you're not documented blindly.

You're not blindly transcribing something, you're thinking about how it fits, how it works and how I'll remember it when I need it, so I'll give you a couple of examples and I think they'll help you a lot. I understand how this works and I chose ted's examples because I think you may be familiar with them. The first example I thought I would share with you is Dan Barber's talk about how I fell in love with a fish. This is the way he would have done it. I did it the old fashioned way. I would have written everything line after line following what he said and how would I explain that to someone else?

I have to read everything. How would you find a particular point that you wanted to remember? Again I have to read the whole thing like I'm studying and going over the exact same things you heard the first time, but here's the mind map of Dan Barber's talk about how I fell in love with a fish, so if you look at the branches here first he he was a chef and he certainly served a lot of fish and he fell in love with a particular fish because he understood that it was sustainable and he did a little more research and found out that they were feeding the fish 30 percent chicken. and he decided, oh, he's not sustainable and he fell in love with that fish, so then he tried a fish that was overcooked and still delicious.

He also fell in love with fish and this fish was so amazing that he even ate the skin and said. He never did it before because he was delicious and he went to talk to Miguel. Miguel was the person who understood that he ran the fish farm and Miguel said: I don't really run a fish farm, I run a bird sanctuary and there are a lot of fish. there and I don't have to bring food for the fish, it's completely natural, they just eat what they eat naturally and the water is clean and everything, so Dan Barber learned a lot about this and learned a lot about farming and has recommendations on it. but the most important thing about his talk is that I realized that he asked really good questions and it was the questions that gave him the idea.

He asked questions about what sustainability is. He asked the question: how could an overcooked fish with legs taste like this? Well, how does overcooked fish taste so good? Then he asked why flamingos fly so far to feed, so it was the questions that helped him understand the whole topic and then be able to share it with us and with you. Seeing a mind map allows me to explain it to you. You can follow what I'm saying. Let's do another one. Mr. Ken Robinson has given several talks. He spoke about creativity in schools and claims that schools are killing creativity.

And here is my little handmade mind map again. and I recommend that when people first learn them to do so, but you'll find out even later, even after you get really good at it, just grab a piece of paper and a pencil that's useful any time you want. take notes, you'll do it all the time, you won't have to worry about doing it in any special way, but of course when you want other people to read your handwriting, sometimes it's not so good, I admit, so I put it. sometimes in a computer program and there are a lot of them and that allows other people to read it too, so Ken Robinson was the one who talked about creativity in school and said that the problem, the good thing about children is that children are not They are afraid of making mistakes and therefore they are more creative, but we teach them some of that.

He also had some wonderful quotes that he wanted to remember. One of his quotes had to do with the fact that if insects disappeared, he said that all life would end but if humans disappeared the rest of life would flourish. I thought it was pretty cool and I wanted to make sure I remembered it, so it's one of my branches. He also talked about using jokes and he had a lot 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 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?

Here I have a mind map where I showed what was important to me in his talk and being able to do it in a mind map allows you to pay attention to what you want, write only the things that interest you and there they are ready for you to explain and he wanted creativity at the top of the pyramid along with literacy and I remember that when I look at the mind map, so what about you? Maybe you too feel a little angry if you've never heard of this before, maybe you're thinking that you might have been helping your brain all along or maybe you knew a little about this but never really paid attention and learned how.

Using it requires some practice. Anything new you do takes some practice, so now I challenge you to practice using mind maps and you will really help your brain. I have one last little story or anecdote to tell. I share it with you and that is that a few years ago I was asked to help my young granddaughter who was not doing well in social studies and I went to help her and I showed her how to make a mind map and she made a mind map of the chapter about us . government and the next day she got one, the first she ever got in social studies.

It was very exciting, so two days ago I called her and asked her: do you remember that day I came and showed you mind maps and she said "sure sure", we had all these colored pens and we made this drawing and I really understood that chapter and I did very well on the test the next day and I continued to use it in school, especially in high school, so I challenge you to not only practice mind maps and learn them better, but share them with other people. When you do, you will internalize it better and be able to use it better.

Teach someone else and especially some children how to use mind maps. Thank you.