3 Levels of Mind Maps Every Student MUST Master

mind mapping can be broken down into three different levels of skill when mind mapping is done at a skill level of level three it's legitimately one of the most powerful learning techniques that you can Master it improves your memory it increases your processing speed it makes it easier to think about more content more deeply but when mind mapping is done at level one it can be a complete waste of time for me being able to do a level three mind map every time is a big part of what gave me the confidence to run a

business full-time while going through medical school and then later my full-time Masters for which I ranked first in my year now the first step and actually being able to level up your mind mapping is to be able to look at a mind map and identify what level it's at once we can figure out the difference between the different levels of mindmap we can then focus on the processes that help us Bridge each of these levels so I'll show you some examples of each level of my maps see if you can Spot the Difference so these

ones are level one [Music] and then these ones here are level two and these are some level three now you might think that the main difference is that a level three mind map just looks simpler or more comprehensive but it is so much more than that and the difference between a level one and a level three is probably the difference that separates a top 30% learner from a top 1% learner but before we get into that let's take a deep dive into level one so here's the example of the level one mind map again now

the level one mind map has two important characteristics the first thing is that it has nonlinearity of ideas so if you have a look at this you can see that it's not just going left to right down the page uh all of these things it's trying to represent the ideas spatially around the page and second thing is that there are connections between the ideas uh you can see that they're trying to express these connections with these lines and arrows now the difference is actually a lot more obvious when we go back a level to what's

even before level one which is level zero note taking and level zero note taking looks a little bit more like this and these are actually my old notes from like over 10 years ago go and I can tell you that the thousands of hours I spent on writing notes like these were ultimately a waste of time so at level zero there are five characteristics that you should definitely avoid firstly it's very linear uh secondly it's usually very wordy and thirdly it's pretty superficial uh it doesn't go into the content very deeply it doesn't really look

at how ideas are related to each other because frankly trying to write that all down through level zero linear note taking would be completely overwhelming there's often a lot of highlighting and sometimes there's a lot of annotating and at the end of the day it is uselessly timec consuming in that it takes a lot of time but it's not really helping with our retention or our depth of understanding so level one really represents this first point where someone's trying to break this old linear mold but the important thing is not to just recognize the characteristics

of each level it's to know what the process is that takes you from level zero to level one and there are three key processes that someone is engaging in to go from Level Zer to level one the first process is that they're looking at how they can use arrows and lines to represent information instead of just writing it out as full sentences so no full sentences the second thing is that we're trying to cut down on how wordy it is we're often doing a little bit more summarizing and the third part is getting a little

bit more comfortable with just representing information spatially and without using words when we follow these processes we go from Level zero to level one now at level one we're not really getting a strong benefit from mindmapping the real power of Mind mapping comes comes from level two and level three and in fact level one often looks pretty messy however level one is not bad mind mapping is a skill and like any other skill there are levels to that skill and you can't just skip a level level one is necessary because it allows us to break

out from Level zero to then work towards level two it's kind of like training wheels on a bicycle and a lot of people will say oh I gave mind mapping a go it didn't really work for me but they actually only reached level one and you're right if you only reached level one it's not really going to work for you so let's have a look at level two where you should see some benefit here's an example of the level two mind maps again and once we're at this level two skill we should be feeling a

lot more comfortable with expressing information nonlinearly and at level two there are three characteristics to look out for first of all we have groups of information and these groups are related to each other and as a result there is a clearer flow or structure to the information you can see these groups being represented uh here in the brown uh as well as the flow of information with the arrows being a little bit cleaner and if your mind map has these characteristics it's probably at level two and by the way let me know what level you

are in the comments so that I can help cater my future videos to you so now that we know what a level two mind map looks like let's think about what the processes are that take us from level one to level two there are again three main processes that we want to focus on here the first one is that we're thinking a little bit more about how ideas are similar or different to each other and by thinking about how similar things are to each other this allows us to put them into groups we're arranging them

by those similar ities number two we're now thinking about how the information actually flows and influences each other we've created these groups we've looked at how things might be related and similar to each other and we're thinking how do these ideas connect together in a coherent structure which leads to number three we're actually thinking about intentionally creating more of a structure as opposed to for example just drawing a bunch of lines and arrows connecting things all over the place and overall the the difference between level one and level two the major difference is that we're

spending a lot more time thinking about how we want to arrange the information and organize it as opposed to just getting used to organizing it nonlinearly and by thinking about how to organize the information in level two and later also in level three we're forcing our brain to engage in that higher order think which is one of the most important cognitive processes that you can do to understand remember and apply what you learned properly in fact the oecd has even come out with a statement saying that higher order thinking skills is one of the most

crucial things that a modernday learner needs to know to be successful so what that means is that if you are mindmapping and you're not noticing improvements in your understanding or your memory or your ability to apply the information it probably means that you're not engaging at that higher order of thinking and that would be common because most people tend to avoid higher order thinking since it takes more mental effort and it can feel uncomfortable which basically means most people are avoiding the type of thinking that helps build stronger memory and deeper understanding in the first

place this is famously called the misinterpreted iFit hypothesis which I've talked about in lots of my other videos and this is important because there's essentially no point in using mind mapping as a technique if we're not engaging in the right type of thinking and it's actually really easy to demonstrate the difference between level zero level one and level two so I'll show you using this article on metacognition which is just taken from Wikipedia it could be from a textbook or from lecture slides uh it doesn't really matter this is just a demonstration so at level

zero let me show you what my note taking would look like I'll type it out for you so you don't have to struggle reading through my handwriting so as I'm running these notes all I'm doing is I'm reading a sentence I'm summarizing it a little I'm transcribing it down honestly I may as well have just used chat gbt or something to do this because it takes no mental effort and my brain is almost asleep uh no real learning is happening in the brain now there actually is a way to still do linear notes while still

getting level three results uh and I'll show you that one later okay so I'll just end that demonstration there because I'm losing brain Styles let me do the same passage at level one and so here as I'm writing I'm mentally doing the same thing I'm basically just reading a sentence I'm summarizing it a little uh maybe a little bit more concisely and then I'm just writing it down and I'm basically just looking to see if it's connect to anything else really obviously and I'm putting some lines and arrows down as we are progressing you can

see it's starting to get a little messy and honestly like it's already kind of overwhelming in terms of just there's a lot of lines and arrows going everywhere um and this is usually when a lot of students will say it's not working since it might actually feel worse than just linear nodes which were at least easier to read but anyway that was level one same content same stuff but done through level one mind mapping and you can see some similarities with the examples that I showed you before so now let's do level two exactly the

same content again now here there's a big difference in thinking compared to before because instead of just going sentence by sentence and putting it down I'm actually uh reading more I'm actually thinking about it back and forth I'm actively deciding how I want to structure this information in a way that makes sense and I'm also actively trying to group related ideas together you can see it's looking tidier it's there's more groups it's a little bit easier to follow and it's actually a lot more engaging in fact it's actually even a little bit fun and I

can feel that the information uh sticks in my head a lot more easily while at level zero and then level one I barely remember what I wrote down uh also it's a little hard to see from the video but the time I spent just thinking about what to write before even writing anything down in the first place is a lot longer so at level zero and level one I'm I'm basically writing something every 5 or 10 seconds I'm pretty much writing Non-Stop and at level two I'm thinking about things for like you know 20 or

30 seconds or even more before even writing it down because I'm just trying to think about how I want to arrange it that's actually um one really good way to see if you're thinking about things enough to learn effectively it shouldn't really be possible to think at level two depth and also write constantly so that is level two and now going from Level zero to level two is probably enough to give you a decent little grade bump of like 10 to 15% but level three is where you start seeing some serious improvements now before we

go into what a level three mind map looks like I just want to preface by saying that my mapping is a complex skill it took me like over a decade of trial and error and reading research to really Master it and I'm glad that I did because I'm able to save time for you uh with videos like these but what about other skills that are not mind mapping brilliant question and Brilliant is the answer brilliant is a sponsor of today's video and it is where you learn by doing you learn by experimenting solving problems making

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to brilliant.org jusung or click the link in the description you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription if you use that link now let's dive back into the level three mind maps which is where the real power of mind maps comes in here's an example of my maps at level three again and there are three characteristics that you need to know uh at level three the first thing is that the structure and flow is much clearer you can clearly see uh where where the information is going throughout this map number two there's more emphasis

to some groups and arrows over others for example you can see that these arrows are a little bit thicker compared to for example these arrows that visually indicates the importance of information and relationships and this last one is harder to notice but the groups themselves are more intuitive and easier to remember so if we kind of zoom in a little bit here we can see that the actual name of the the groups that have been used are not always the same terminology that is taught for the topic they've actually relabeled the group so it makes

more sense for them at an intuitive level it's actually easier to understand the difference between level two and three by talking about the processes that we need to engage in to go from level two to level three now by the time we're at a level three skill we're used to writing nonlinear notes we're used to thinking about how things are similar we're used to grouping things together we're used to creating structures and flows what we're focusing on with the process at level three is the quality so we're improving the quality of the connections and relationships

that we're forming we're also increasing the quality and when I say quality I'm talking about how intuitive the groups that we're forming are yeah sure we can connect this group to this group we can connect these ideas to these other ideas we can group these things together sure but which way of grouping is actually the best for us which makes the most sense which is the most intuitive which feels like it's going to be stickier in our memory which means number three we have to spend time to identify Alternatives and then make an actual judgment

on which one is the best for example here's that little map that I made before at level two and then here is the exact same map with essentially the exact same information but just grouped and structured differently so at level three I'm actually thinking about these alternative ways of structuring the information and arranging them in a way that makes more sense to me at level three our mind maps are becoming cleaner more intuitive more deliberate the lines and the arrows and everything that I'm putting on there is more intentional now for most people the difference

between level two and level three uh may not seem like much after all we're still just grouping and organizing information but the difference between level two and level three in terms of how much it affects your performance and results and memory and depth of understanding is probably more than the difference between going from Level zero all the way through to level two being able to create a level three mind map consistently is very uncommon and probably translates to aough L top 10% level of performance in fact the type of thinking that you have to do

for a level three mind map is so crucial that virtually any top 1 or 2% learner is going to be thinking in this way even if they're not using mind maps as the technique mentally they're engaging in those same higher order thinking processes and patterns which is why earlier I said that it is actually possible to do level zero uh linear note taking but still get level three types of results and let me show you how so just going back to my article on metacognition here I'm going to do the like pseudo level three note

taking with linear notes uh here so as I do this just notice how I'm spending a lot of time reading and um and when I'm writing I'm not actually just reading things and writing things down I'm actually thinking about it and synthesizing it and I'm doing all of that higher order thinking and grouping and thinking about how things are related to each other I'm doing that all mentally as I read and then I'm writing down like my entire synthesis and structure so it's almost like a mini essay where I'm trying to explain all the relationships

and nuances of the content that I've read and this is basically how you're able to get some people that are using what seems like a pretty mediocre method of note taking but they're getting great results because mentally what's going on is at a high level but there are two specific reasons that you should not do this first of all it's honestly just much harder than doing the level three mind map because I'm having to do all the thinking in my head and all the processing I can't track my thoughts and uh all the relationships that

I'm thinking of on the mindmap so it's much much harder for me to actually create the connections and organize my thoughts being able to just literally write it down and brainstorm the ideas as I I go uh is probably two or even three times faster and easier than trying to do it all mentally and then just forcing it back down into a linear set of notes again this is actually also the reason why you should use mind maps to plan uh literature reviews and essays it's also probably two or three times more time consuming overall

not just when I'm writing the notes but later when I go to review the notes I'm forcing myself to have to read through this entire thing all over again to extract the the meaning from it whereas if I had just the Mind map I can just glance at it to review the structure in like seconds or minutes and even though the Mind map looks simpler it's actually the same types of relationships and thoughts that as were in the essay the essay is not a more comprehensive set of notes at all in fact the essay probably

doesn't even cover all of the relationships that I'd be able to express in the mindmap the level three mind map is incomparably simpler faster and more organized this synthesized essay writing thing that I just did you can use that as a revision technique later instead now if you found this video and you want even more to help you master the Art and Science of learning then I've got a free Weekly Newsletter that I've created where I've taken my decade of coaching and distilled what really works into bite-sized emails each email contains a key concept to

help you improve your memory your depth of understanding your ability to apply your knowledge as well as a practical takeaway or a challenge it's completely free and the concepts that I talked about in this video are also included in one of those newsletters as well as other Concepts that I have never made any videos about if you're interested I'll leave a link for you to join that in the description thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one