Is "mind mapping" "right-brained"?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3004

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-03-21 01:53:08

Thanks for the reference, Daly. As usual, Fallows manages to be interesting while being dead wrong on the fundamentals. <g> I differ with him, as usual, on points where he thinks he is stating the obvious, and most would agree. He writes:

“Both of these visually oriented and, therefore, right-brain programs [i.e. MindManager and the add-on that costs more than most applications, Results Manager]take getting used to and require tinkering to bring out their best. That is why my left brain accepts them, too.”
I’m tending to the conclusion, on the other hand, that the Buzan school has tempted tens of millions of self-improvers with minor artistic gifts into thinking that they could leverage their talents as a general learning tool by spending most of their time on visual embellishment. But the truth, it seems to me (based mostly on self-observation, I admit) that graphical outliners will benefit most those with meager visual gifts, including those with frank visual deficits. The greater salience of the cues signifying the relations among the elements will serve a compensatory function for the individual who is not good at holding spatial relationships in mind. It pictures the relationships so the person using the graphical outliner must spend less effort picturing those relationships, but the visually gifted form such pictures without effort.

So, crudely put, yes it’s a “right-brained” tool, but it’s compensatory right-brained tool, a tool most useful to “left-brained” users.

Stephen R. Diamond

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