March 29, 2018

"Create a mind map of words, phrases, and ideas that pop into your head or spend some time browsing the many mind maps online. Write a poem, story, or journal entry inspired by the mind map."

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And that, for me, is the most uninspiring prompt I have ever come across. I have looked at pictures of mind maps and I found them confusing. Here is one:

Looks nice, does it not. It is suggested that one should use colours and images and other media, which is where the trouble would start for me, the chromatically obsessed me. What if I used dark hues for the main branches and lighter shades for the further splits? Sound good, but wait, I start planning, the primary shades, then the secondary one and when I come to the fourth or fifth the trouble would start; either I run out of colour pens or I have similar shades for two main branches. See that, obstacle before I start. 

And then comes the next hurdle, images, I can get lost searching for them and then I come across something lovely, ones that can be downloaded without copyright infringements and I do that. Before you know, I would have spent a couple of hours with a few images that I could use for the mind map and a ton of others, because they are beautiful.

So I do to think I will try mind maps in the near future.

[A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information. A mind map is hierarchical and shows relationships among pieces of the whole. It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those major ideas.

Mind maps can also be drawn by hand, either as "rough notes" during a lecture, meeting or planning session, for example, or as higher quality pictures when more time is available. Mind maps are considered to be a type of spider diagram. A similar concept in the 1970s was "idea sun bursting".]

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