quant, I perfectly understand your stance which had been mine for years - but in my case at least, it had been a more or less theoretical one, whilst on the other hand, I even pested (well, that was 2 or 3 years ago, not lately) in the outlinerforum against "flat" "mind-maps" - I thought, from a theoretical pov, that such graphic representations should, as much as possible, be faithful mimicries of what might be going on in your head, hence my being electrified by concept maps, the more complicated the better, and I tried, for a long time, to put a thing like TheBrain ("PersonalBrain" at the time) into effect for me.
In my case, this thinking was a dead-end, perhaps because I hadn't been able to MAINTAIN SCOPE of all that, but then, the majority of people can't get to this working for them - you own a doctorate in mathematics if I'm not mistaken, so I assume your natural capacity to maintain that scope even when its elements get rather numerous, is way beyond average, but for us "average people" (in this respect at least), a flattened-out thing like "mind-maps" seems to be of much better use, and that's not only my own experience, but that of any people whom I spoke to, and which had used "mind-maps": their character of "not too complicated", i.e. "not integrating it all" is seen as an advantage, whilst, as said, years before, I had been sure of the contrary, without delving into these advantages with real-life "mind-maps" of real interest to me though: just "playing around" with such maps isn't sufficient to become aware of their real value, it seems.
Hence my explanations in my post above: This "minor" graphical representation, which also forces you to cut off many aspects into adjacent maps, whilst your intuition - mine at least, at the time -, says, "more integration would be preferable", hence the attraction of 3D-representations, in realiter it seems to be the other way round, those "simplifying" 2D-representations, cut up, on top of that, into numerous separate parts, instead of trying to contain a max of elements, seem to do much better thinking-triggering work than the more complicated solutions, but which seem to over-complicate the task for the ordinary mind as well, and my post is about this phenomenon, this paradox; as said, brains that are interconnected in a superior way (and there is no irony here whatsoever) might function otherwise, with higher quality, not only with higher speed.
Btw, for years, I had used flowcharters (from Micrografx (from buggy version 3 that cost me a fortune at the time), and the unavoidable Visio (from 5 up to 2002), in order to avoid that "mind-map" "disadvantage" of being "nothing more but a graphical tree", when in fact, accepting this limitation of "mind-maps" full-heartedly, you quickly become aware that it's more idea-generating than flowcharts are: It seems there's also a "convergence effect" playing here, i.e. "multiple satellite thinking" around the "source" item AND around multiple "further down items" (when technically speaking, these ain't but children and grand-children of various degrees) - whilst in many flowcharts, there might work a "disparational / divergence effect" against you, as does in 3D's.
I know I'm presenting paradoxical stuff here, but that's what makes such musings fascinating. As said, my experience with "high-brow" solutions is rather negative, my experience with "low-brow" solutions like "mind-maps" is very positive, and so I'm correcting my former stance on these matters and I'm trying to explain these phenomena to myself and to others, to get new ideas by this, from fellow posters as from myself.
And again, it might be that people with an IQ of 130 or higher might be much more apt to process, and hence to profit from, 3D-representations than our brains working at about 120 speed; we all know that one of the more important elements of the IQ is the capacity to process more elements simultaneously; brains that are capable of processing e.g. 7 elements might not only function more quickly, but also in another quality range than minds that only process, let's say, 4 elements at the same time - so it's important to find the best ways to make even "standard" brains working better than they would without getting any such external help.
As for the missing integration with UR or other outliners, we have to live with it for the time being, and thus, don't try to synch manually, don't try to replicate content (which especially means, not even downwards), have your (e.g.) MM and your (e.g.) UR systems as COMPLIMENTARY systems: You'd get lost by trying to establish a sort of coherence.
But since UR allows for deep links, i.e. single items as external link targets, it could be interesting to do such deep links, within your (e.g.) MM maps, not only to pdf's or Excel tables or such, but also to details within such UR items.
Beware, though: The more you do within your maps, the less you do within "texts", the better your output will probably be, and this means, when in doubt, don't put a deep link to a UR item into your map, but add some other child items (or a child map) to your branch within the map itself.
(Edit for typos and such.)
Last edited by schferk; 11-11-2012 at 03:24 PM.
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