Tony Buzan, Inventor of the “Mind Map”, Has Died | Hacker News Reader

Tony Buzan, Inventor of the “Mind Map”, Has Died

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I am curious how other people have found mind mapping useful.

I only find it useful if the edges mean something logical, like cause/effect, or hierarchical like "A is the boss of B". But when it's merely drawing lines that imply some sort of fuzzy "is related" relationship, or "A makes me think of B", it only leads to a bunch of nodes and lines that are a jumble.

I find mind maps very useful.

I like to categorize things by branch (and use the number, etc. icons to cross-reference sometimes.)

It's not perfect, but it's better than reams of text. I think sometimes the primary value of the mindmap is the study I put in building it.

They aren't my go-to tool but I have found mind maps useful for playing with high-level doc structures. I used one today to prevent some candidate taxonomical groupings to some domain experts, and it served the purpose of sparking debate and getting feedback on suggested regroupings

Mind maps are useful when you don't know what the structure is before hand. For instance, when I start a new job, I tend to mind map everything. I really have no idea how to organize concepts, names, computers/servers, etc. But, a mind map makes it very easy to reorganize as I gain more clarity. Eventually, I drop the map once I understand innately.

His books sounds like snake oil to me. Never found mnenmonics useful , only tricks to impress teachers and friends.

I love mind maps and still use them regularly. I find them particularly good for marshalling my ideas at the start of a project when it's just important to get things written down somewhere and bash them into a sensble order and heirarchy. I also use them as quick single page summaries for revision of topics.

RIP Tony.

Takes me back to my first year at university in 1979/80 when I used mind maps to take lecture notes. A valuable contribution to learning technology.

Aw man. I've used them all through school. We were taught to, since like 2nd grade? Cool stuff.

Had completely forgotten about mind maps until the recent reference in Sex Education.

Rest in peace, sir.

Shameless tribute plug: my mind map project - jumproot.com

That's more of an outlining tool than a mind map. An inner node should be able to connect back to any outer node to fully define a thought space.

Yes but I want to keep the tree view. Been trying to brainstorm ways to do a graph in a tree view (or something with similar attributes).

And believe me, I use this as a mind map daily.

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