Mind Mapping – the Pros and Cons of it !

I had the opportunity to read a number of books and a lot of consolidated material on ‘the universal techniques of Mind Mapping’ during my preparation for GATE examination. I had only three months in my hand and an entire syllabus of Biotechnology to cover. So I decided to apply various mind-mapping skills to confine my ‘para-graphic’ ideas into ‘one-liners’ or ‘one-words’ or what I say, ‘my something visual’.

Biology is a vast field and one needs to remember a lot in comparison to other subjects like Mathematics for which one needs a minuscule conceptual understanding and rather maximum analytical skills. But in Biology, it turns out to be exactly the other way around. So one needs to focus on the Good , the Bad and the Ugly of Biology and still value them equally.

Learning those mind mapping skills may be a good way to start gluing the ideas into one’s minds. One needs to prepare ways not to get distracted or disheartened by the long paragraphs which sometimes feel as to be not so useful. One also needs to bifurcate the time spent on various topics and sub-topics in order to reach the destination in jumps (like the rabbit and not like the turtle, unfortunately, that fairy tale doesn’t hold good in current scenario) rather than slow short steps in order to cover the entire area.

A good strategy is to clear the idea of the domain which we are studying. It must have

• Main Topic
• Groups of sub-topics
• Floating ideas related to main and sub-topics
• Connections and inter-relations (if any)

For example, if I want to study the topics based on Metabolic Pathways, it can have

Main Topic : Metabolic Pathways ,

Sub-Topics: Glycolysis , Gluconeogenesis , Pentose Phosphate Pathway , Glycogen Metabolism , TCA Cycle , Urea Cycle , Lipid Biosynthesis , Fatty Acid Catabolism , Ketone Bodies formation and varied floating ideas like their source/organ of origin , amount of energy (in ATPs) generated and end products. There may be a lot of inter-relations existing between each pathway as the metabolic system is highly connected. But given that the data is in text form, does not develop a lot of curiosity in us, as we still find it as an abstract rather something one can remember easily. So in order to make it more readable and attractive I created a mind-map.

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