TEDxBologna - Astrid Morganne: La creatività delle mappe mentali (Mindmapping for creativity)

(Music) Thank you very much. Good evening everybody. Let me introduce myself. I'm Astrid Morganne. I'm a life coach. Professional training and personal development are my working areas. In the last years, I studied something a bit peculiar: the brain functioning, how the mind organizes information and ideas. I will now connect to what Andrea said before about the organization of time. We are living in an age where time always slips away. And the first question I would like to ask you is this: who has an organizer? Or who uses an organizer? OK. Raise your hands. Who uses an organizer? OK. Almost everyone does. I would also like to ask you: Who uses two organizers? Three? We usually have an organizer on our mobile, a paper one because sometimes we like to take notes, another one is on our PC. An organizer could also be a person, for example a partner: "Remember we have dinner tonight!" Or a son: "Tomorrow we will do this thing." So we are constantly organizing our time. We also want things organized because we need clarity. So, when we open our wardrobe in the morning - that's a classical example - we find -- hopefully not in our home -- something like this. We love to stay organized, even when it comes to small things. It would be a chaos and a waste of time to find a wardrobe in such a mess when we need to get dressed in a hurry in the morning. So we tend to be super organized, especially our wardrobe: we want to know where we put our shirt, where we put our trousers and so on. And this is the organization of things. Then we like to organize our living spaces. Our homes or apartments are divided into different areas: the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen. So we put the kitchen next to the living room for time optimization purposes. So we don't waste time making our meals -- -- we only take a few steps, we find a sofa, we eat and we sleep on the sofa. So we do a lot to optimize our time. We organize our time, we organize our things, we organize our living spaces. And finally, our place of work: how do we organize our notes and information? Does this remind you of anything? Consider your PCs full of post-its -- or the wall next to where you work -- Today we receive a lot of information. In today's world, in a single day we produce lots of information, much more than what a human being can actually handle in his entire life. And what do we do to get this information organized? Do we keep using post-its? Or loose sheets of paper? We can find them everywhere, even in our car and so we lose precious information. To organize information I use mind maps. This is an example similar to the one in your brochure. We can organize our thoughts and information in a useful way. And what else can you do with mind mapping? Not only you organize your thoughts but you can also save time -- how? Using the same formation in your brain. This is the picture of a neuron. Typically a neuron contains a nucleus, a soma, then a ramification, the axon and the dendrites. This is an example of how our brain works. I use the same thing. When you draw a mind map, in the middle of a map, in the nucleus or soma, you put the project or information you are receiving and then you develop it in the ramifications. You do this because it is a mind map -- first, you organize the thoughts, second, you plan things clearly - so you don't have thousands of notes, the books and magazines, your PC and folders -- but you have your planning in a single sheet: only one sheet! and third, memorization. Memorization is very important but only if it is in the long term because we do not need to memorize things for a day or a week. We are not at school any longer. It was a good way to prepare school exams. But now we want that the things we studied or developed remain in our brain for a long time. Let us have a look at how the memorization works. Memorization is best practised through images. Images are crucial for human beings. We think through images, not through words, What remains in our brains are images. Human beings started making drawings on the cave walls a long time before they could talk. An image is a cluster of many words. So we use images to memorize things. And we use colors. Colors are very important for our memory. Here at TED, the main color is red. We can see it everywhere. Red is very important for us. During our evolution, the color red was the archetype of blood. And so it was very important for us. This color reminds us of dangerousness. Either it is me bleeding and thus I must be careful or I hurt someone or an animal in order to survive -- so, we use red -- why does a woman dressed in red or a red Ferrari attract our attention? Because they recall the archetype of the survival of our species. So the more colored notes we use the more things we will be able to remember in the long run. And moreover, the emotions. Emotions are the "chelates" of what is inside our memorization. It is almost impossible to remember one thing if it is not linked or "chelated" to an emotion. So, three things: images, colours and emotions. What do we do at school? How do we take notes? We generally take notes in a linear way, with a black or dark blue pen and, of course, the emotion we attach to this is not very pleasant. So this is why we forget a lot of what we have learned at school. Now let us take a look at these mind maps. We can use these structures at work in our companies to create an organization chart, a planning, a project, a common objective or vision. It is very important when you are in a team that the people who work in the company or on a project have the same vision. Otherwise it's a huge waste of energy and you might not be able to achieve your goal. So you can use mind maps for group work. It is very important for me and I love working with kids or in the private sector. Kids in today's school must learn a lot of things but they cannot remember everything. So they draw mind maps. I really have obtained great results in the first place because they like mind mapping and they like it because it is colored. This is a natural thing for kids: they take colors and draw everywhere even on walls. But once you reach the age of 30-40, you don't use crayons and colored pencils any more and it's a pity because any person who uses colors has fun and having fun helps memorization. Here you see a kid having lots of fun. He is actually studying. This is all he has done at school. He remembered everything when he did his exams. Now to end my talk, I want to ask you: what could change in your life if tomorrow you learn how to organize your ideas and the information you receive during the day? We have so many things to organize in our lives: things, time and information today are so important and we should preserve them for ever, as long as we live. Thank you. (Applause)