All About Mind Maps

British author and TV personality Tony Buzan popularized the term “mind map” in the 1970s in his BBC TV series, Use Your Head, and in his books, such as Modern Mind Mapping for Smarter Thinking. However, the concept of visually mapping out ideas dates back much further.

Porphyry of Tyre, a third century philosopher in Greece and Rome, is credited with visually mapping Aristotle’s Categories. His invention, the Porphyrian Tree, didn’t include illustrations, but other thinkers added those later. In the 13th Century, philosopher Ramon Llull also used this type of diagram, including an illustrated Porphyrian tree.

Many famous thinkers and innovators throughout history have been noted for organic, curving notes, often including drawings and doodles. These include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison and Mark Twain.

In the 1950s came the introduction of the semantic network, a theory of how people learn and the semantic relationships between concepts.  In the 1960s, the theory was advanced by Allan M. Collins and M. Ross Quillian. In the 1970s, learning experts developed concept maps, which have a radial structure but aren’t organized around a central concept like mind maps are. Meanwhile, Buzan has said his mind map approach was inspired by Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics, popularized by science fiction writers such as Robert A. Heinlein and A.E. van Vogt. Buzan has said people often absorb information in a non-linear fashion, not always left to right and top to bottom, and mind maps are designed to play to that.

Related concepts include:

• Sunburst chart: A multi-level pie chart, also called a ring diagram.
• Spider diagram: An extension of Venn diagrams and Euler diagrams. A spider diagram adds points to those, and joined together they form a spider shape.
• Mnemonic: A memory device to improve learning. Mnemonics take many forms, such as acronyms, visual cues and sounds.
• Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagram: A diagram used to visualize system design in software engineering.