Creative Thinking and Mind Mapping (part 1 of 2)

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Innovative thinking can benefit greatly from mind mapping because it is able to consume all the common skills found in imagination, creativity, flexibility, and organization of ideas. There are some fundamental elements that you need to know if you want to improve your creative thinking. According to psychological research, these elements include using shapes, colors, unusual elements, and dimensions. Aside from that, it also involves the adjustment of the conceptual positions and it also considers the response to emotionally pleasing objects.

According to further studies, mind maps are the best tools in nurturing creative thinking. If you try to apply mind mapping in any of your activities, you will be able to create lots of innovative ideas than what you’ve expected.

In creative thinking, there are different stages. In the first stage, you can start by drawing a central image to represent a general topic. Make sure that the image is drawn at the center of the paper or blank page. Try to focus in the image and take note of the ideas that come into your mind. Welcome all ideas that enter your mind and indicate it on paper. You don’t have to write a lot of text; in fact, it will be a lot better if you use graphics or drawings instead. Take note of all the ideas no matter how absurd they may seem.

After that, you need to take a break so that your brain can also rest. Look at the ideas that you’ve generated. Get another blank paper and create a new mind map. Use the same central image but this time you need to identify the categories and major branches. You need to build up the hierarchies and look for new associations from the preliminary ideas. If you see repetitions of ideas in different branches, disregard them and don’t try to remove them because they might be important later on.