Shakespeare Mind Map

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

Mind map—Wikipedia

Tony Buzan, a British writer, has created a standard set of guidelines for making successful mind maps (see 7 Steps to Making a Mind Map on Tony’s mind maps page). Although mind maps don’t contain as much detailed information as a page of text, they do use evocative imagery and trigger-words to inspire new thoughts and connections in your brain more rapidly than any paragraph of words ever could. Some do a better job of this than others, but after glancing at a few mind maps it becomes clear that there’s something valuable about the format’s ability to convey relationships between ideas with such ease.

Included in the selection of reader-submitted mind maps is a Shakespeare mind map. Visually, it leaves something to be desired (it doesn’t follow a couple of Tony’s best practices for mind maps, namely using lots of colors and images throughout the map) but a perusal of the branches does begin to cause my brain to buzz; I begin to think about the plays in the context of their meaning, purpose, audience, and venue. All of the emotions Shakespeare’s works have ever aroused in me come flooding back into my memory. Just the experience of revisiting collected memories and having the opportunity to create fresh associations between them makes reading mind maps an invaluable exercise. Especially since it takes so little time.

But reading mind maps isn’t the only way to create fresh associations in your brain. Especially when it comes to the works of William Shakespeare. As someone who abhors routine and cannot maintain a predicable schedule, I tend not to be able to choose how and when I will absorb Shakespearean media. Sometimes it’s audio, in my car, sometimes it’s by reading the plays on a quiet weekend morning in my kitchen, sometimes it’s reading articles and other Shakespeare blogs on my computer at lunch, and sometimes it’s by watching performances on my television or at some venue in Boston or Cambridge. I’ve found that, while each choice offers experiences the others lack, it is in the combining of these multiple strategies that gets my brain making valuable connections. Just being a Shakespeare playgoer, or just being a Shakespearean actor, or just reading books by Shakespearean scholars isn’t enough if you want to learn something new. You should mix your poisons, so to speak, and beyond that try and connect other things you do back to William Shakespeare and see what your brain comes up with in response.