Master Mind Mapping: Overcome the Illusion of Fluency for Faster Learning

Mind mapping is one of the best [music] learning and thinking skills you can master. But most people who have tried

mind mapping haven't found it to be that amazing. The reason is that there is a problem with mind mapping, a universal

problem that nearly everyone runs into. And if you don't know about this problem and you don't [music] expect it and work

around it, mind mapping will not be effective. You will feel like it's kind of useful to organize your thoughts, but

it's not really that special. But I can tell you with confidence >> [music]

>> that there are very few other techniques that when done properly are as useful as mind mapping. It's allowed me to learn

things three to four times faster than before. It allowed me to graduate medical school with distinction and come

first place in my masters after studying for just a few weeks. So what is this problem with mind mapping that stops

most people from getting these types of results? The problem is that mind mapping

forcibly breaks fluency. And if you want mind mapping to actually work for you, you have to expect this. So here's what

this means. Let's say that you are doing some normal you're just jotting some notes down on a notion [music] page,

sort of summarizing things as you read through a book. And we're just going to call this normal

learning. So not using a mind map. And so let's say that we are reading a book.

With normal learning, what we're going to do is we're then going to write these notes down. And then maybe some

summarized sentences, a few bullet points. And as we do that, our brain is going to produce these signals. And by

signals, I mean feelings that our brain recognizes. So for example, when you read through a new sentence talking

about a concept that you've never heard of before, as you write down these notes and you paraphrase it and you summarize

it and you write down the bullet points, you are going to get the feeling of understanding. And as you make your

way down this page and as you write more and more notes, you are going to get the feeling of progress. And when you do

this for a long enough period of time, that initially complicated new material, when you read it again, it's going to

feel much more familiar. And so, we're getting familiarity, and with familiarity, we also feel that

it is faster to be able to move through that information. And so, I use the word

signal because all of these feelings are signaling to your brain that we are learning

well. If we're moving through this page, and we don't feel like we are understanding it, we're not making good

progress, it's not feeling more familiar, and we're not moving any faster, these would be signals that we

are not learning well. And the reason I'm talking about this signal thing so much is because our brain is constantly

monitoring the techniques and strategies that we're using to make a judgment on whether it's worth continuing or not.

And this is the reason when we start mind mapping, this breaks. These signals that previously indicate to us that we

are becoming more fluent in the information, these fluency signals, mind mapping strips this away. So, with mind

mapping, we may be starting with that same book or that same piece of reading, but instead of outputting it like this,

we're now turning that into keywords that are connected to other keywords. And maybe not even in

the same order that's represented on the page. We're taking multiple ideas, and we are grouping them together. And the

way that we start thinking about the information and what to represent is fundamentally different. With normal

non-mind mapping related learning, we are incentivized to focus on how we will express the information

accurately and concisely. With mind mapping, we are incentivized to express the relationships

and connections between information accurately and concisely. But the problem is taking linear information,

which almost all information that you consume is going to be linear. Like for example, you listening to me right now,

the words are coming at you one word at a time. You are processing seeing that in a linear fashion. When you read words

on a page, that's a linear fashion. And taking linear information and expressing that in a non-linear

format, which mind mapping is, takes much more effort and thought than going from linear to just another more

condensed form of linear. And one of the reasons that it's so much more effortful and difficult to do this

is because you are having to make many more decisions that you normally wouldn't have to make. When you're going

from linear to linear, let's say they introduced the ideas A, B, C, and D in this order. And there's a few paragraphs

of text underneath each main concept explaining it. With the normal way of learning, all we have to do is make the

decision, how can I cut this paragraph down into bullet points or smaller sentences. But the order of ideas stays

the same. The way that the idea is expressed is essentially the same. But with mind mapping, all of these things

now change. You now have to make decisions about where to place each of these on the page. Maybe A goes here,

and that links to B in this direction, but then B links to C over here because you want to create a nice loop back

through D like that. If this is how the information is related to each other. And if A has lots of different points,

maybe those points are expressed like this. And maybe those points are related to each other. And maybe one of those

points is related to C over here. And C has its own set of points. And maybe one of those is related to another point

within B. And so you're now having to make many more decisions about the order of concepts, the relationships

between those concepts, the spatial arrangement, literally where you're going to put it on the paper. And on top

of that, how do you make it concise? Which is the same type of thinking that we were doing up here. So you can see

that mind mapping introduces many more aspects of thinking and decision-making that linear note-taking does not

require. And for that reason, when we do mind mapping, the signals, the feelings that we get are very different. Instead

of feeling like we are understanding the new material, it often feels like we are getting more confused about the

material. Because there are so many more things, so many more dimensions to think about. Instead of feeling like we're

able to make quick progress through this page, learning often starts feeling very

recursive or slow because we're making all of these different decisions for each new concept. It's painstakingly

slow to figure out where to arrange it on the page. And because you're not necessarily thinking about how something

two pages later relates to something on the first page, you're not going back and forth. You have to do that with mind

mapping to figure out those connections and relationships. And that feeling of familiarity

often comes much later. So this is delayed. We stay in this confused state for a longer period of time before we

start getting that sense of familiarity. And so normal learning triggers many more signals to our brain telling our

brain that we're developing fluency. Mind mapping sends signals to our brain saying that there is a lack of fluency.

It forcibly breaks the feeling of fluency. And as a result, it feels like a waste of time. It's unnecessarily

complicated. It does help to generally organize thoughts, but it's not really translating into uh real-world

performance or better outcomes in any way. Or at least that's what it feels like when you don't work through this

problem. Because the fact that mind mapping forcibly breaks fluency is also one of its greatest strength. And it is

the core reason uh why mind mapping is one of the best skills that when you master allows you to think so much

faster and so much more clearly. And it all comes down to asking just one crucial question.

Does the feeling of fluency translate into performance? Years ago, when I was in high school, I used to

play tennis. Very badly. And I remember practicing my serve and practicing it in a way that allowed me to feel more and

more comfortable with the technique. And I got to a point where I adjusted the way that I was holding the racket and my

foot placement and how I was throwing the ball that made that tennis serve feel way more comfortable than it ever

felt before. So, excitedly, uh I went and showed my my coach. And my coach told me that I had gotten worse than

before. And that is because I had misinterpreted the feeling of comfort as being good

technique. What I didn't realize is that there are some things that to do it effectively, you need to do it in a way

that at first feels uncomfortable. And so we can take that same perspective and apply it to mind mapping and thinking.

When we have reading through material and we're getting these feelings like we're understanding it, we feel like

we're making progress, we're flicking through the pages, we're writing more notes, that familiarity is building, we

feel like we're getting faster. How important are these feelings? How accurate is that as a representation of

our ability to perform and use that knowledge? And thankfully, because of some great researchers out

there, we have some really clear answers to this question. And the answer is the feeling of fluency is mostly wrong.

In fact, it is so wrong that in the research, this is called the illusion of fluency. And this starts to make sense

when you actually look at what it means to be a high performer, to have really good knowledge and great retention and

an ability to apply that knowledge at a high level. When you look at what it means to be able to do that and work

backwards, things start to make sense. So, if you want to have high-performing knowledge, what this

means is that you need to have a certain level of retention. I.e., you're able to hold on to the new

knowledge that you've learned for long enough for you to actually do something with it. If you're learning something

new and then you forget it a week later, that's probably not enough retention, unless you're only learning it for a

very short amount of time and that's all you needed for. Those situations are pretty uncommon in vertically deepening

domains where what you learn early on becomes foundational material for your later expertise. And so, you need to

have high retention. You also need to have a high level of mastery. What this means is

that you can understand the information deeply and accurately, but you can also use that information together. So, it's

not being used only in isolation, you can bring multiple concepts and facts and perspectives together to solve lots

of different types of problems. So, I like to say that this type of knowledge is integrated. And in the real world,

you also need to be able to do this efficiently. Basically, in a short amount of time. A

great example of this is actually looking at retention. One way that you can make sure that you keep high

retention on information is that you just constantly repeat it to yourself. Many of you may have used flashcards in

school university. Flashcards work by just essentially using repetition to keep things inside your hippocampus,

stopping it from decaying and fading away. But this is ultimately not time efficient because if you need to repeat

everything that you learn every day or every few days or even every couple of weeks, then it doesn't take long for you

to be burdened with this debt of hundreds or thousands of things that you constantly need to be repeating. And

typically, if that's the situation, uh and you are actually forgetting things that quickly, it usually means that uh

you're not able to use that information to a high level of mastery, either. And the golden word that this all comes down

to that I talk about all the time is this word schema. What happens inside your brain

at a neuroscientific level is that when you learn new information, for example, reading from that book,

that information first goes in and is processed by a part of your brain called the hippocampus. And gradually over

time, it enters into a longer-term, more stable form of storage in somewhere called the neocortex, which is uh sort

of this generic uh word for lots of different areas of your brain that store memory. It gets actually pretty

complicated breaking that down. Now, if information does not move into your neocortex, right? It doesn't get

consolidated into your neocortex, then it stays inside the hippocampus. But the issue is that knowledge that stays

inside your hippocampus tends to fade more quickly. And so, if you're keeping everything that you learn just inside

the hippocampus, this is the situation where you're just burdened with all these things that you're essentially

just trying to memorize through repetition over and over again. When really, the hippocampus should be

thought of more like a temporary state that gives your brain the chance to move it into the neocortex where it stays a

little bit more locked in. So, what determines whether something is going to stay in your hippocampus or whether it

gets consolidated into the neocortex? The answer is the schema. That new piece of information that's

currently in your hippocampus, your brain needs to find a way to make that connect into some kind of network. It

has to have a place to belong. It needs to be organized. It can't just be this random piece of information that you're

trying to hold on to. It has to fit and belong somewhere because it's connected to other things that you know, other

pieces of information. And when it's able to see how it's all connected together, that is what allows it to move

into the neocortex. And this actually creates a positive spiral of efficiency because as your schema grows and you get

more new knowledge added to it, it means that there are more anchor points for you to connect other new knowledge. This

is the reason why an expert is able to learn a new fact within their domain very quickly, whereas for a beginner, it

may seem completely obscure. It's all about whether the new information fits into some kind of schema. And so, once

you do fit that information into a schema, then naturally what happens is that your attention is much much higher.

And because it's connected to all these other ideas, that's what creates this integrated knowledge that has deep

understanding and you can use this knowledge and apply it at a high level to all sorts of diverse situations and

complicated problems. And because, number one, you have more anchor points to build off of and number two, you're

not [clears throat] having to spend all of your free time just relearning things that you're forgetting every single day,

it indirectly massively improves your efficiency. This is the reason why I was able to cut down my studying time by 5

to 10x while doing even better than before. Because just imagine how much time you would save by not forgetting

everything that you're learning. So, if you want to have high performance, this is the requirement. The knowledge

that you're trying to gain, the information that you're learning, to get the results that you're looking for, to

get the raise, the promotion, the good exam result, to get all of those things, that depends on how good you are at

forming these schemas. And because of the nature of forming schemas and creating these uh relationships and

connections that go, you know, all over the place, this process of schema formation naturally feels very

recursive. It can feel slow. It is always fairly effortful, requires a lot of very active thinking. And it can feel

confusing because you're actively looking for areas that you're

confused in. You're asking yourself questions to figure out how things are connected together. You're deliberately

thinking about which parts of this topic are confusing for you so that you can dive into that and clean it up and

organize that a bit better. You encounter more confusion because you're moving towards the confusion and

resolving it. Much like how a cleaner experiences a lot of dirt because they're going to where it is dirty and

cleaning it up. And so this is how effective learning actually feels. Compare that with the signals that you

get from mind mapping and notice the similarities. Now, I will mention though,

learning doesn't always have to feel difficult and slow and effortful. For example, a lot of the things that I'm

teaching you right now about learning science and neuroscience, when I initially learned about this years ago,

I don't think it was very easy for me to learn that because I was trolling through, you know, like hundreds of

research articles and reading really complicated textbooks that I don't think explain things in a really clear way.

And so, there are certain concepts that I try to explain in, you know, a few minutes that back then it took me like

days or even weeks to really wrap my head around. And in fact, I do encourage you to take that shortcut, the faster

path in this instance. If you want to spend the next 10 years of your life uh reading through research and books and

doing, you know, trial and error to figure out how to learn and think more effectively,

be my guest. But, if you don't and you want to do that like 100 times faster, then you might be

interested in joining my free weekly newsletter where I've taken what I think uh the most important insights and the

most important practical takeaways that I spent years figuring out, and I've packaged those into three to five-minute

emails sent into your inbox for free every week. So, if you're interested in learning how to think and learn more

efficiently, and you've enjoyed the video so far, you found it insightful, then I think you're going to find the

newsletter is insightful as well. You can unsubscribe at any time. If you're interested, I'll leave a link in the

description below for you to join. Now, in my experience, there are two types of people who find mind mapping to be not

very effective. There are the first type of people who try it and they feel all these things. They feel more confused,

it's recursive, and it feels kind of slow, and they're really using a lot of that mental effort just trying to

organize the ideas on paper. It feels really hard. And because it feels difficult and they don't realize that

that is the stuff that's actually driving this incredibly valuable, uh crucial schema formation, they say, "Oh,

this is not for me." And then they stop. For those people, just do it. Give it a go again. Just push through and you will

feel that your ability to have that knowledge, retain it, and then use that is much higher. But, there is another

group of people, and this is actually more problematic, much more problematic. The second group of people are people

that will try a mind map, and they'll feel that it's not effective, but they're also not feeling more confused

or that it's really recursive. They just feel like it's basically just the same as my normal method of learning. It's

just that now I'm, you know, drawing it out into like different areas on the page. Like it's not really doing

anything for me. And if that's been your experience of mind mapping, then that is almost always

because you are actually self-adjusting back towards fluency. Because here is the thing. When you use mind mapping and

you're trying to figure out, "Hey, how do I, you know, order all the different ideas?

How do I relate everything together? How do I space things around?" When you do that kind of thinking, there are so many

possible options. Like I've sort of shown here, you know, you've got multiple different ideas that are all

sort of related to each other, and it starts getting honestly really messy and hard to follow. And once it gets to a

point where it is this messy, your brain is not getting a lot of benefit from it because it's just too

much going on. It's too disorganized. And so what some people will do is that because they believe that it's a good

thing to feel those fluency signals and for it to just feel smooth and fast and easy, they will just not think about all

the messy stuff. They will say, "Oh yeah, I feel like A connects to B, and that probably connects to C like

this, and then there's D, and that's probably connected like that. Yeah, I think that's right." If they want to

expand, there's a few points within A and B, and they just add them there. "Oh yeah, that's probably connected like

that." And they just stop here. And they stop here because to think about all the other possibilities

is very overwhelming very fast. And so if that's you, the change that you need to make is when you get to this point,

you have to ask yourself, "Okay, but how could it be different? How else could I arrange it? What are the relationships

and the connections that are real and present that I haven't explored yet, that I haven't expressed or drawn out?"

And when you do that, naturally what will happen is that it will start to look a little bit more like this, much

messier. This is a good thing. It should look messy in the early stages. Some people get to this point and then they

stop here. When you get to this point where it's messy, this is when that schema building really starts. You've

got the raw material here, you've got valuable connections. All you need to do is look at this and ask yourself, "How

can I clean this up? How can I organize this a little bit more intuitively, a little bit simpler? How can I space

things out to let the ideas have a bit of room to breathe?" By doing this, you actually also start uh utilizing certain

visual and spatial parts of your memory as well, which is a really great additional memory cue that helps with

your retention. And as your paper starts to become more organized and clean, your knowledge and your thinking starts

becoming more organized and clean as well. And it is only at this point, where you're looking at that

overwhelming mess in the face and you're accepting that you need to clean it up and slowly work your way through. Only

then are you really doing mind mapping correctly. Only then do you have a mind map, a map of your mind. And it will

feel confusing and it can feel overwhelming, but you have to remember, if that is the map of the mind and it

looks confusing, it means you are confused. The knowledge is confused. It is disorganized. All you've done is

you've put that disorganization on paper where you can see it. And now that you can see it, you have the opportunity to

organize it and clean it up. This is why sometimes I like to call it a mind mirror rather than a mind map. So, don't

be afraid of confusion. Don't be afraid of the dirt. Clean the dirt up. Because remember, with normal learning, all of

that disorganization and all that confusion and chaos, it's still there. And the first time you get

to see it might be when you are sitting the exam or when someone tests you on your knowledge or when you really have

to deliver and perform with your knowledge. You don't want to get out of bed, you know,

wash yourself, dress yourself, and go out to some important event without ever really looking at yourself in the

mirror. So, don't go out and try to perform with your knowledge without seeing how organized your thoughts

really are using a mind mirror. So, that is the problem and the strength of mind mapping.

And I can't wait for all the study influencers to backtrack on their previous advice and start copying this

as well. Anyway, if you actually want to go deeper on the specific techniques around mind mapping, I have a video

where I go through that technique in a lot more depth over here. So, make sure to check that out. Remember, the link to

the newsletter is in the description below. But otherwise, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.