Radiant thinking and chunking: how the brain works

How one idea calls up another

Think of the word lemon. Within two seconds your mind has produced: yellow, sour, tart, saliva, summer, lemonade, perhaps a specific memory.

What you have just observed is not a list. It is a star-shaped activation: a central node activating associated nodes simultaneously, each of which activates others.

Tony Buzan called this radiant thinking and built mind mapping on it in the 1970s. The principle: if thought works as a network, notes should take the shape of a network.

Chunking

Your working memory holds about four items at a time, according to Nelson Cowan's work published in 2001, which revises downwards the famous seven plus or minus two of George Miller.

To get past that limit there is only one solution: chunking. Seven separate letters saturate working memory; a seven-letter word takes only one slot.

A mind map is a chunking machine: each main branch is a container that absorbs five to ten sub-items, and costs the mind only one unit.