Next you took your five new, freshly created ideas, and from each of them you created three more new ideas. Another threefold or 300% increase! In no time at all, you started from one idea, and created 15 new ones; a 1,500% increase!
Now ask yourself: ‘Could I create another five words/ideas from each of the 15 words that radiate from the original key five?’ Of course you could! That’s another 75 ideas created!
Could you add another five from each of those? Again, of course you could – another 375 ideas! That’s 37,500% more ideas than when you started! Could you keep going to the next level? And the next? And the next and the next? Of course you could! And for how long? Forever! Generating how many ideas? An infinite number!
Mind Maps demonstrate that you have ∞ creative abilities.
This new knowledge has immediate applications. You can use it to give you the confidence that you will always be able to find an appropriate word, that you will always be able to find a solution for a problem; that you will always be able to come up with creative ideas; that your natural ability to link and connect will always help you with any thinking situation; and that you will always now know that you are smarter than you think!
Unconsciously, you have already been demonstrating this infinite creative capacity all your life. It’s called procrastination! Just think of the incredible creativity, the amazing number of original ideas, that you generate every day when you think of new reasons (excuses!) for not sorting that cupboard, studying that book, doing that unpleasant or boring job … infinite creativity!
When you have generated many creative ideas you can go back, using your mighty association power, and look for links and connections that will generate new super-ideas that will solve your problems, help you make decisions, and help you come up with those new inventions that will make you your fortune!
This infinite association power allows you to generate as many ideas as you want in any creative area. The advantage of this is like the lottery: the more numbers you have, the higher the chance that you will win (come up with the ‘winning’ idea!).
Mind Maps are therefore the best way to express your brain’s infinite creative potential. We suddenly see why so many people have problems when they try to use standard linear notes to help them think. Those who Mind Map do not have such problems.
Linear Note-taking and Its Problems
How were you taught to take notes and, indeed, how do you still make them?
If you are like 99.9% of the world’s population, you will have been taught, as I was, to make notes that use words, lines, numbers, logic, and sequence.
These are pretty powerful tools.
The only problem is that they are not a complete set. They represent your brain’s ‘left-brain’ skills and do not include any of your ‘right-brain’ skills, which enable us to comprehend rhythm, colour, and space, and to daydream. In other words, you and I were taught to use only half, or 50%, of our brain’s mighty tool-kit. We were, literally, trained to be half-wits!
It’s much the same as if I asked you to run 100 meters so that we could check your running efficiency. I give you two trials. In the first one you are allowed to use 100% of your body. You’ll probably score in the 90–100% range for efficiency.
In the second trial I allow you 50% of your physical apparatus by tying your right foot up behind your back to your right hand. Once again I ask you to run 100 meters. The result? Flat on your face in the first centimeter! Efficiency comfortably less than zero, because you may well damage yourself in the process!
It’s the same with using only ‘one side’ of your brain. Our traditional notes, in addition to using an incomplete set of tools, have another major weakness.
Students around the world are taught to take notes in blue or black ink or in pencil. In my own school it was even more specific – we had to use only blue-black ink and it had to be of a particular brand. If we dared to use blue or black, we were punished by having to do reams of lines! What is the disadvantage of this mono-colour note-taking approach?
Think about it: a single colour, to your brain, is a mono(single)tone of colour. What word do we get when we combine the concepts of mono and tone?
Monotone!
And if something is a monotone, it is, by definition, monotonous! And what do we call something that is particularly monotonous?
Boring!
And what does your brain do when it is bored? It tunes out, turns off, drifts, daydreams, and falls asleep.
And it doesn’t matter whether you are an English-speaker making notes from left to right, whether you are writing in Hebrew or Arabic making notes from right to left, or Chinese making notes vertically – to the human brain it’s all the same, it goes to sleep!
So we conclude that 99.9% of the world’s educated, literate, and graduate population is making notes for the vital purposes of creativity, memory, planning, organization, thinking, and communication that are specifically designed to tune them out, turn them off, and send them to sleep!
It is sadly ironic that with this traditional note-taking system, very often the more notes you take, the more complicated simple things begin to seem.
The lines of our traditional notes are like the bars of prison cells in which the infinite creative thinking capability of our brains are incarcerated for life – unless we free them with Mind Maps.
In a very real sense, these sentences that form the prison bars of our brains’ prison cells are Prison Sentences!!
Linear notes, by their very nature and structure, train you to become less and less creative. Mind Maps, on the other hand, by using the full power of your imagination and all your left-/right-brain thinking tools, allow you to tap an infinite source of creativity.
The Worldwide Web in Your Head and Its Creative Power
The Worldwide Web is credited with enabling a massive surge of worldwide creativity. In addition we use the Web for accessing information, for communicating, for storing knowledge, and for having fun.
As you are probably beginning to realize, your brain has its own internal Worldwide Web! In fact, your brain is organized much like the Worldwide Web, except that your brain has many advantages:
It has far superior equipment.
It is much faster at accessing information.
It can generate its own information much more rapidly and expansively.
It contains many more patterns of thought – if you compared the total network of the Worldwide Web with the potential patterns inside your single brain, it would be like comparing a garden pea to a planet!
Mind Maps reflect this internal web, acting as a conduit between your personal universe and the outside universe.
The great geniuses, as you will soon discover, understood this.
The Great Creative Geniuses and Note-Taking
As a Mind Mapper, you will begin to facilitate the same thought processes that were used by the greatest creative thinkers in history! Both Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein used their imaginations fully. It was Einstein who said:
‘Imagination