I am sharing it with you because I want to explain the tag line in my blog's name: "mind mapping my thesis into existence". Thesis, books or other personally written documents larger than 200 pages don't just happen to randomly appear in one's computer folders or books shelves. If it were that easy, everybody would be a writer or a published author. I constantly imagine how it would be like to wake up one fine morning and find the RoBoPo.dox on my desktop freshly spell-checked, complete with list of figures, bibliography and ad-noted index. Without this mental picture in my mind, anchoring my existence, I would feel helpless, to say the least..The day I will, eventually, live that experience will be the day I will think I've died and went to Heaven (whatever that may be like!) .While the idea behind a book/thesis/(insert document here) can be spontaneous, serendipitous, irrational or it may come by way of dreams, images, connections, flashes of inspiration and any other mental paraphernalia one prefers, getting that idea into print is the result of a long, physically and mentally draining process for people and things. Think of the trees that died to make the paper you print on, or,better yet, think about your committee's hair turning all silver-white, their foreheads wrinkling for all eternity with every "brilliant" comment you come up to hide the fact that you can only present some 3/4 page chapter idea... Thesis writing ain't for the faint of heart and nerves!
Mind mapping can ease this writing pain and make the whole process more fun. It's a kind of magic :)
If you are not familiar with mind maps and mind mapping let me "upgrade you/flip a new page/ introduce you to some new things/ upgrade you" ...I'm not trying to be arrogant or anything. I truly believe this to be a revelation that will enrich your studying skills tremendously. It has done so for me and I want to share that joy. Technically speaking, this "thing" called "mind map" has been around for a couple of decades by now. I am surprised that not many people use it on a daily basis. It makes such a difference in everything from simple organizing to planing life long decisions! It's simple, fun, colorful, never boring and, most of all, addictive.Once you map (mind map) you just can't stop! So, thank you Tony Buzan for making my life and my studies that more interesting !
Look at the image and I'll go through some of the the steps of making a mind map. FIRST, start with a 3D picture. Mine is a cube- they're the easiest shape I can draw up instantly. The chapter's name is "Body-nomics". I wrote that on the cube to remember my main chapter idea at that time: to gather all the relevant numbers or statistics that can be used to argue that sociologists should look into what people are doing with/to their bodies because "body means big business". There's a new body-economy (body-nomics) complementing "the somatic society". SECOND, I listed the main topics of the chapter. I want to gather data on physical aspects of the population, the "quality" of that population's embodiment,numbers and figures on body care, the number of surgeries performed. You can see them as lines emerging from the cube: green, red and indigo., respectively. There are two other lines. The black one is labeled RoBoPocities and the Yellow one is called "cognitive". I got the idea for "Yellow" as I was reading a book on NLP and I thought I might use that insight for my thesis: how we have the "body" in our "mind" every minute and every second of all our lives. The "black" is what my "other-then-commitee-member" reader(s) might learn from this chapter: how to structure their city into a RoBoPocity , i.e, to perceive their city through the lens of body project availability. Does is make sense so far? The THIRD step is to add more detail, in a way that mirrors the mind mapper's own logic and associations. All the lines are "branching" out with different concepts. The rest is easy as "apple tree". This is my own interpretation of what to do next. Apple tree stands for "A(ptly) P(ursue) P(revious) L(inks) E(xpansion)."Tree" sounds like "three" so you will remember to repeat step 3 over and over again. If you have a very large piece of paper you could go as far as writing down the actual words you intend to type on the computer... Imagining the "details"/ concepts/ words would be more practical, though..
Think of the trees!
Music
It's a kind of magic : (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mirPnfe6dAE)
Upgrade you : (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AFbSSjWjh8)
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