Mind maps have been around. There are many ways to do it. There's lots of science that supports it.
The smartest people in the world swear by it. But the truth is, it's a difficult skill to do. I was doing it wrong for a while, even during medical school.
But the system I'm about to share makes it really simple. And I'm going to demonstrate using an advanced medical topic just to prove that even if you don't know anything about the subject, that mind mapping can still help us learn the most complex concepts. And by the end of this video, we are going from a blank page to complete mind map.
So first of all, just understanding why we mind map actually helps us better with execution. The process of mind mapping helps us understand the topic better. And second, the product, which is the mind.
map itself helps us remember better. It's a great study guide for review. If we compare mind maps versus traditional notes, mind maps are better for review because they are expressive.
They use visuals, analogies, abstractions, and associations. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? It would take me a lot longer to read through these paragraphs of notes.
Whereas I could look at this and instantly remember what the whole topic was about. So that's the remembering side. But what about the understanding side?
Well, I can I can see how every single detail relates back to the big picture. This is easy to understand because it's related to this, which is caused by this, et cetera. So compare that to learning with flashcards, which are isolated information.
I can't see my thought process, right? This makes the big picture harder to understand. So everything we just went over is covered in our mind map acronym called tree thought process, relationships, expressive and efficient. Get it. My maps are trees, Cajun core academy trains.
Rangers, Rangers protect forests, you get the picture. Hey Misty, can you activate the mind map protocol? Initiating mind map protocol.
Step number one, prepare a list of key terms. So for this example, I'm going to mind map nephropathology. which is basically the study of kidney disease.
And here is my list of terms that I got from lecture. Step number two, outline the terms. So I'm going to figure out which are the main topics and which are the subtopics. And this step really used to trip me up because I used to try to mind map all the terms at once and I would just end up with this really messy mind map that looks something like this, which is basically useless for review.
So we want to identify the main concepts because those will be the trunk. of our tree which will later be giving a structure to the rest of the map step number three is plot the main topics on the page so i'm writing all the topics on the page here and i'm leaving plenty of room in between so i can draw all sorts of relationships and arrows and stuff for step number four this is where the tree acronym starts to kick in so in this step we find the thought process how do these main topics fit together logically like imagine that these are all individual puzzle pieces and we're trying to fit them together to see the big picture i found that a good trick is to ask how do these key terms relate to each other are they similar or different can i compare and contrast them is one a cause or effect of another are these parts of a bigger whole when i ask these relationships it automatically implies that i gotta know the definitions of the these terms. So let's go through some of them. Acute kidney injury.
This is basically a type of kidney damage that happens abruptly, that happened like within a short period of time. For example, if I took a drug that I'm allergic to and it causes kidney damage within a few hours, I would say that I got AKI from a drug allergy. All right, let's look at the next one. Chronic kidney disease.
This is basically another type of kidney damage. Uh, we see that there is a relationship between CKD and AKI. They're both types of kidney damage. If I compare and contrast them, I find that the difference here is that CKD takes place over a long period of time, typically years.
So both are types of kidney damage, AKI is short timeframe, CKD is long timeframe. Next is end-stage renal disease. This is also another type of kidney damage, but this one has been happening for so long that the kidneys basically don't even work anymore.
So the thought process I'm realizing here is that kidney damage occurs on a time spectrum, AKI to CKD to ESRD. So I can visually depict this process by maybe drawing a spectrum and labeling it 0 to 100. 100% working, 0% working. So the thought process is clear and now I might be able to group all the rest of the key terms onto the mind map based on this thought process, based on timing.
Overall, this makes the big picture a lot easier to understand for me. Step number five, find the relationships. So this kind of goes hand in hand with the previous thought process step. We've basically already found the relationships between the main topics, but that's okay.
Let's try to find some more. So I could group these other key terms according to the time frame. Some diseases tend to cause persistent damage over years. For example, if you have diabetes and you don't treat it, then it'll just keep causing kidney disease for years and years.
But if you have something like an infection causing kidney disease, and you treat that infection within a few days, then the kidneys usually get better pretty quickly. So I could group these other key terms by relationship of timing. But I was reading a little more, I found another relationship that might be even more useful.
So in general, the whole kidney system looks something like this. We have the kidneys, which are responsible for filtering our blood. So it picks out the good stuff to keep in our bodies, and it picks out the bad stuff that we just pee away into the toilet as urine so blood coming in urine coming out into the toilet this whole thing in itself is another thought process that comes about while i was reading so it's more memorable to me and so all these other terms cause damage somewhere along this pathway so the relationship here is location all right to spare you the time i'm just going to quickly fill them in but for example this disease typically happens here damaging the kidney cells itself this disease typically happens further upstream causing less blood supply and basically starving the kidneys. And this disease typically happens further downstream in the form of a blockage that causes everything to just back up like traffic and it causes total mayhem. So even if I had no idea what some of these key terms mean, like renal calculus, is that some kind of mathematical equation for kidneys?
I don't know, but I can figure it out. I would at least know that it causes disease in this location of the system. And the treatment for all diseases in this general location is the same. You got to remove the blockage. That's why relationships are so important.
It helps you figure things out. Now, for those of you wondering, real calculus means kidney stones. Stones block urine from coming out. Stuff backs up.
Kidney stones are extremely painful because our body is trying to squeeze a giant stone through a tiny tube and it hurts. The solution is to remove the blockage. With medicine or surgery or...
laser or whatever. Step number six is to be expressive. So I'm looking for ways to express ideas in the form of visuals or analogies.
So instead of writing renal calculus is the formation of hard deposits that obstruct and cause congestion of the ureter. Treatment of large severe urethal lithiasis includes lithotripsy versus nephrolithotomy versus blah blah blah. Like how long does that take to read and review right?
So instead I've expressed it as a visual. Makes it so much easier to review. But being expressive with mind maps seems obvious, yet we have a lot of students making mind maps like this.
And this. I'm personally not a fan. I would invest a little more time up front to deeply think about these concepts and what they're about, and possibly find some kind of analogy to my favorite anime or Marvel movie.
I want to express all my ideas visually. Step number seven is make our mind map as efficient to review as possible. So to do this, let's revisit all the other parts of the tree acronym and make them all efficient for review.
So first is thought process. I want to make sure that I can easily see the flow of ideas. Because when I look at my mind map, my eyes should know exactly where the starting point is. I don't want to waste my time trying to decipher my own mind map.
Like look at this mind map. It's kind of hard to tell where the thought process is. And reviewing it would be really inefficient.
I want to be able to see a clear line of reason. So maybe make the arrows thicker and bolder. Or make the main concepts really stick out.
Like here's a spectrum of damage and here's a flow of process. Next is relationships. I can efficiently see the relationships between the ideas.
One way to make it more obvious is by using color coding or highlighting. So for example... Damage upstream is red, damage to the kidney itself is blue, and then damage downstream is yellow. Red indicating the kidney getting less blood, and yellow for urine. You see how I'm abstracting right there.
So another way to make relationships more efficient to review is to try to group together as much info as possible. You don't want to have like 10 different things coming out of one point. So for example, I've already grouped all these kidney diseases by location in the entire system, but let's say... what if I had like 10 different diseases here that cause damage to the kidney itself?
You know, that's way too many. So I would do my best to find a way to group it even further. I'd have to look for even more relationships.
And if I do a little more reading, I'd find that I can group the diseases by the type of kidney cell that they damage within the kidney. So like glomeruli, tubules, interstitial, etc. A general rule of thumb is that I try not to have more than three to four branches coming off at any one point. And then finally, expressive, which I've probably talked about enough by this point.
Visuals are more efficient to review than text. A trick that I love doing is to pack a lot of info into one image. For example, if I have to memorize a bunch of details about a disease, like if this disease causes you to... have moon faces, red urine, petechial rash, and I don't know, camel hump, then memorizing this list would be difficult if it's all words.
But if I draw a picture that depicts all those details, then not only does it instantly become more memorable, it makes review much more efficient. So this whole process took me about an hour or so to do, including all the reading and trying to figure out important relationships. which is totally worth it if I compare it to the hours of review I would save if I used this efficient study guide, plus the hours of relearning I might have to do if I didn't understand the relationships and thought process the first time around. There are many ways to mind map, this is what I prefer, but let me know in the comments if you found this helpful or super confusing, and if you want to check out more learning and study skills then check out this video right here.