While doing a quick Power browse of Boss Magazine (Jul 08) I spotted Professor Robert Wood, director of the Australian Graduate School of Management’s Accelerated Learning Laboratory, talking about how problem solving techniques such as Mind Maps, builds brain flexibility.

“What we are really trying to do with knowledge is to work out what are the relevant chunk of knowledge and what are the relationships between them because that is how we hold it all together” Mind Maps let people create chunks and also see their relationship to each other.

“If you said to somebody, ‘Here are 64 pieces of information’, there is no way they could memorise them, or use them functionally,” says Wood. “But if you broke those 64 pieces of information down into, say, eight chunks, or four chunks of 16 that are further broken down into other chunks in a Mind Map, the person very quickly can start to comprehend that… they will get the picture and will retain much more of it. “