Rules and Inspiration for building Effective Mind Maps or Cognitive Maps

What's a Mind Map?

A mind map is a creative and artistic representation used to visually and effectively organize and memorize the important information. A mind map is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank landscape page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those. Mind maps can be drawn by hand, either as "rough notes" during a lecture, meeting or planning session or as higher quality pictures when more time is available.

Basic Rules to draw a Simple Mind map:

• Start in the center with an image of the topic, using at least 3 colors.

• Use images, symbols, codes, and dimensions throughout your mind map.

• Select key words and print using upper or lower case letters. 

• Each word/image is best alone and sitting on its own line.

• The lines should be connected, starting from the central image. The lines become thinner as they radiate out from the center.

• Make the lines the same length as the word/image they support.

• Use multiple colors throughout the mind map, for visual stimulation and also for encoding or grouping.

• Develop your own personal style of mind mapping.

• Use emphasis and show associations in your mind map.

• Keep the mind map clear by using radial hierarchy or outlines to embrace your branches.

Uses of Cognitive Maps:

As with other diagramming tools, mind maps can be used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying and organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and writing.

Mind maps have many applications in personal, family, educational, and business situations, including note-taking, brainstorming (wherein ideas are inserted into the map radially around the center node, without the implicit prioritization that comes from hierarchy or sequential arrangements, and wherein grouping and organizing is reserved for later stages), summarizing, as a mnemonic technique, or to sort out a complicated idea. Mind maps are also promoted as a way to collaborate in color pen creativity sessions.

In addition to these direct use cases, data retrieved from mind maps can be used to enhance several other applications; for instance expert search systems, search engines and search and tag query recommender. To do so, mind maps can be analysed with classic methods of information retrieval to classify a mind map's author or documents that are linked from within the mind map.