430 of 438 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Does It Work? Do You Use It? Is It Helpful?, June 10, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential (Paperback)
The majority of the reviews seem to focus on the reviewer's feelings: towards the author, his previous works, "it was too simple," "too complicated," "repetitive," and so on. However, if you're not familiar with mind-maps (which are creative techniques used to organize thoughts, identify key ideas, link themes, and remember more effectively, while using the both sides of the brain), you might think of it as a gimmicky New-Agey concept without practical applications. In other words, not useful, interesting but not useful. I'd just like to give personal endorsement. I've used mind maps for about twenty years to organize engineering projects at work, remember books I've read, identify daily goals, learn chess opening ideas, outline papers I'm writing, and identify the important from the trivial. This book does have flaws in that Buzan has already written it in his earlier works, and the title suggests to more impressive results than can be delivered ("maximize your brain's potential"). You won't become a genius, you will still have to work at thinking, you'll just have an additional tool to help you. Mind maps are fun, easy-to-use, useful ways to organize and retain information and generate ideas. Linear notes just don't jog the memory. It's still amazing to me how a hastily drawn mind map on an article, book, movie, lecture - a map I'll scribble with stupid little drawings and doodles and throw away days later - can help me remember so much years later !! It works. I use it. It helps.
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64 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Making Full Use of Your Brain, especially Visual Cortex, May 20, 2002
This review is from: The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential (Paperback)
"..half of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision.." said Professor Mriganka Sur of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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In this book, Tony Buzan convincingly argues for the importance of Mind Mapping--a method of recording and organizaing information based on the nature of human brains. After reading this book and experimenting with Mind Mapping myself, I do believe that our usual writing system does not enable our brains to function effectively and Mind Mapping is a major improvement over it.
Mind Mapping is based on a few basic principles summarized as follows:
* Represent concepts with keywords
* Make associations
* Organize into hierarchy
* Visualize concepts using images
* Stimulate your brain with colors and symbols
* Order and emphasize according to importance
The major benefits from the use of Mind Maps are:
* Images, colors, and associations stimulates creative thinking.
* Mind Mapping forces you to think actively about the things you learn.
* Efficiency in making/taking notes.
* Learning is simply more fun!
The latter part of the book suggests many uses of Mind Maps: writing a personal diary, sharing stories within a family, thinking, teaching, making notes, presenting a lecture, and collaborating in a professional environment. For example, Boeing created a 25-foot long Mind Map summarizing an aircraft engineering manual, which helped save millions of dollars worth of staff time.
Tony's writing is lucid and the presentation of the book is excellent. I found the colorful examples given throughout the book especially inspiring and useful. The only complaints I have would be frequent repetition of information and sometimes excessive claims of the power of our brains without solid scientific proofs. These will however likely to have positive impacts on the readers, that is, help them think more positively about their own capability and strengthening the message that the book wants to deliver. So you can think of them as features or defects depending on your personal preferences.
Given the amount and complexity of information we need to deal with in the modern world, Mind Mapping is a very valuable tool everyone needs to possess. The benefits far outweigh the cost of learning it.
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51 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book...only one criticism, January 26, 2001
This review is from: The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential (Paperback)
I loved this book. It is especially fun to flip through and look at all of the illustrations which are just as valuable as the reading. My only criticism of the mind mapping model and subsequent software is that it is "too centralized." Natures systems are often decentralized where many hubs are of equal importance. Our mind is the same. Our thoughts are built upon many "hubs" of equal importance rather than one central hub in the middle of many radiating thoughts. In other words, I have found mind mapping to be far more useful when thought of as a "network" rather than a "central hub" like that of a wheel with radiating spokes. A decentralized network is made of many equal hubs with many radiating thoughts and ideas which relate to other thoughts and ideas and other hubs. No single hub is more relevant, "bigger," or more "central" than any other. In this way, the system has greater integrity and stability.
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