mind mapping can be broken down into three different levels of skill. When mind mapping is done at a skill level of level three, it's legitimately one of the most powerful learning techniques that you can master. It improves your memory, increases your processing speed, and makes it easier to think about more content more deeply. But when mind mapping is done at level one, it can be a complete waste of time. For me, being able to do a level three mind map every time is a big part of what gave me the confidence to run a business full-time while going through medical school, and then later my full-time Masters, for which I ranked first in my year. Now, the first step in actually being able to level up your mind mapping is to be able to look at a mind map and identify what level it's at. Once we can figure out the difference between the different levels of mind map, we can then focus on the processes that help us bridge each of these levels. So, I'll show you some examples of each level of mind maps. See if

you can Spot the Difference. So, these ones are level one. [Music] And then these ones here are level two, and these are some level three. Now you might think that the main difference is that a level three mind map just looks simpler or more comprehensive, but it is so much more than that. And the difference between a level one and a level three is probably the difference that separates a top 30% learner from a top 1% learner. But before we get into that, let's take a deep dive into level one. So, here's the example of the level one mind map again. Now, the level one mind map has two important characteristics. The first thing is that it has nonlinearity of ideas. So, if you have a look at this, you can see that it's not just going left to right down the page. All of these things, it's trying to represent the ideas spatially around the page. And the second thing is that there are connections between the ideas. You can see that they're trying to express these

connections with these lines and arrows. Now, the difference is actually a lot more obvious when we go back a level to what's even before level one, which is level zero note-taking. And level zero note-taking looks a little bit more like this, and these are actually my old notes from like over 10 years ago. I can tell you that the thousands of hours I spent on writing notes like these were ultimately a waste of time. So, at level zero, there are five characteristics that you should definitely avoid. Firstly, it's very linear. Secondly, it's usually very wordy. Thirdly, it's pretty superficial. It doesn't go into the content very deeply. It doesn't really look at how ideas are related to each other because frankly trying to write that all down through level zero linear note-taking would be completely overwhelming. There's often a lot of highlighting, and sometimes there's a lot of annotating. And at the end of the day, it is uselessly time-consuming in that it takes a lot of time but it's not

really helping with our retention or our depth of understanding. So, Level one really represents this first point where someone's trying to break this old linear mold. But the important thing is not to just recognize the characteristics of each level. It's to know what the process is that takes you from level zero to level one. And there are three key processes that someone is engaging in to go from Level Zero to level one. The first process is that they're looking at how they can use arrows and lines to represent information instead of just writing it out as full sentences. So, no full sentences. The second thing is that we're trying to cut down on how wordy it is. We're often doing a little bit more summarizing. And the third part is getting a little bit more comfortable with just representing information spatially and without using words. When we follow these processes, we go from Level zero to level one. Now, at level one, we're not really getting a strong benefit from mind mapping. The real power of Mind mapping comes from

level two and level three, and in fact, level one often looks pretty messy. However, level one is not bad. Mind mapping is a skill, and like any other skill, there are levels to that skill, and you can't just skip a level. Level one is necessary because it allows us to break out from Level zero to then work towards level two. It's kind of like training wheels on a bicycle, and a lot of people will say, Oh, I gave mind mapping a go, it didn't really work for me, but they actually only reached level one. And you're right, if you only reached level one, it's not really going to work for you. So let's have a look at level two where you should see some benefit. Here's an example of the level two mind maps again, and once we're at this level two skill, we should be feeling a lot more comfortable with expressing information nonlinearly. And at level two, there are three characteristics to look out for. First of all, we have groups of information, and these groups are related to each other, and as a result, there is a

clearer flow or structure to the information. You can see these groups being represented uh here in the brown uh as well as the flow of information with the arrows being a little bit cleaner. And if your mind map has these characteristics, it's probably at level two. And by the way, let me know what level you are in the comments so that I can help cater my future videos to you. So now that we know what a level two mind map looks like, let's think about what the processes are that take us from level one to level two. There are, again, three main processes that we want to focus on here. The first one is that we're thinking a little bit more about how ideas are similar or different to each other. And by thinking about how similar things are to each other, this allows us to put them into groups. We're arranging them by those similarities. Number two, we're now thinking about how the information actually flows and influences each other. We've created these groups, we've looked at how things might be related.

and similar to each other. And we're thinking, how do these ideas connect together in a coherent structure, which leads to number three. We're actually thinking about intentionally creating more of a structure, as opposed to, for example, just drawing a bunch of lines and arrows connecting things all over the place. And overall, the difference between level one and level two, the major difference is that we're spending a lot more time thinking about how we want to arrange the information and organize it, as opposed to just getting used to organizing it nonlinearly. And by thinking about how to organize the information in level two and later also in level three, we're forcing our brain to engage in that higher order think, which is one of the most important cognitive processes that you can do to understand, remember, and apply what you learned properly. In fact, the OECD has even come out with a statement saying that higher order thinking skills is one of the most crucial things that a modern-day learner needs to know to be successful. So what that means is that if

you are mind mapping, and you're not noticing improvements in your understanding, or your memory, or your ability to apply the information, it probably means that you're not engaging at that higher order of thinking, and that would be common because most people tend to avoid higher order thinking since it takes more mental effort, and it can feel uncomfortable, which basically means most people are avoiding the type of thinking that helps build stronger memory and deeper understanding in the first place. This is famously called the misinterpreted iFit hypothesis, which I've talked about in lots of my other videos, and this is important because there's essentially no point in using mind mapping as a technique if we're not engaging in the right type of thinking, and it's actually really easy to demonstrate the difference between level zero, level one, and level two, so I'll show you using this article on metacognition, which is just taken from Wikipedia. It could be from a textbook or from lecture slides, uh, it doesn't really matter. This is just a demonstration. So at level zero, let me show you what my

note-taking would look like. I'll type it out for you so you don't have to struggle reading through my handwriting. So as I'm running these notes, all I'm doing is I'm reading a sentence, I'm summarizing it a little, I'm transcribing it down. Honestly, I may as well have just used ChatGPT or something to do this because it takes no mental effort, and my brain is almost asleep. No real learning is happening in the brain. Now, there actually is a way to still do linear notes while still getting level three results, and I'll show you that one later. Okay, so I'll just end that demonstration there because I'm losing brain styles. Let me do the same passage at level one. And so here, as I'm writing, I'm mentally doing the same thing. I'm basically just reading a sentence, I'm summarizing it a little, maybe a little bit more concisely, and then I'm just writing it down. I'm basically just looking to see if it's connected.

anything else really obviously and I'm putting some lines and arrows down as we are progressing. You can see it's starting to get a little messy and honestly like it's already kind of overwhelming in terms of just there's a lot of lines and arrows going everywhere. Um, and this is usually when a lot of students will say it's not working since it might actually feel worse than just linear nodes, which were at least easier to read. But anyway, that was level one, same content, same stuff, but done through level one mind mapping, and you can see some similarities with the examples that I showed you before. So now let's do level two, exactly the same content again. Now here, there's a big difference in thinking compared to before because instead of just going sentence by sentence and putting it down, I'm actually, uh, reading more. I'm actually thinking about it back and forth. I'm actively deciding how I want to structure this information in a way that makes sense, and I'm also actively trying to group related ideas together. You can see it's looking tidier. It's there's

more groups. It's a little bit easier to follow, and it's actually a lot more engaging. In fact, it's actually even a little bit fun, and I can feel that the information sticks in my head a lot more easily while at level zero and then level one. I barely remember what I wrote down. Also, it's a little hard to see from the video, but the time I spent just thinking about what to write before even writing anything down in the first place is a lot longer. So, at level zero and level one, I'm basically writing something every 5 or 10 seconds. I'm pretty much writing non-stop. And at level two, I'm thinking about things for like, you know, 20 or 30 seconds or even more before even writing it down because I'm just trying to think about how I want to arrange it. That's actually one really good way to see if you're thinking about things enough to learn effectively. It shouldn't really be possible to think at level two depth and

also write constantly. So that is level two. And now going from Level zero to level two is probably enough to give you a decent little grade bump of like 10 to 15%. But level three is where you start seeing some serious improvements. Now before we go into what a level three mind map looks like, I just want to preface by saying that my mapping is a complex skill. It took me like over a decade of trial and error and reading research to really Master it. And I'm glad that I did because I'm able to save time for you with videos like these. But what about other skills that are not mind mapping? Brilliant question. And Brilliant is the answer. Brilliant is a sponsor of today's video, and it is where you learn by doing. You learn by experimenting, solving problems, making mistakes, and learning from them. They have thousands of interactive lessons on subjects like data analysis, math, programming, and AI. Brilliant helps you to build knowledge that you can learn and then apply within minutes. You can also fit it in whenever you've got time.

which helps to build a habit of learning something useful every single day. Their hands-on problem-solving approach makes it much faster and more fun than the traditional boring old lesson. It's an opportunity to train your critical thinking and real-world problem-solving skills, which are part of those crucial higher-order thinking skills that I mentioned earlier, as opposed to the normal kind of pointless memorization, which is very lower order. Brilliant has recently launched a bunch of new lessons on data analysis and probability, which is a subject that I'm personally pretty interested about. It uses real-world data and trains you on how to find trends to make better decisions. It's perfect for learners at any level, and you also get to see the real data from companies like Starbucks, X, and Spotify. To try everything that Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, go to brilliant.org/jusung or click the link in the description. You'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription if you use that link. Now let's dive back into the

level three mind maps which is where the real power of mind maps comes in. Here's an example of my maps at level three. Again, there are three characteristics that you need to know at level three. The first thing is that the structure and flow is much clearer. You can clearly see where the information is going throughout this map. Number two, there's more emphasis to some groups and arrows over others. For example, you can see that these arrows are a little bit thicker compared to, for example, these arrows. That visually indicates the importance of information and relationships. And this last one is harder to notice, but the groups themselves are more intuitive and easier to remember. So if we kind of zoom in a little bit here, we can see that the actual name of the groups that have been used are not always the same terminology that is taught for the topic. They've actually relabeled the group so it makes more sense for them at an intuitive level. It's actually easier to understand the difference between level

two and three by talking about the processes that we need to engage in to go from level two to level three. Now, by the time we're at a level three skill, we're used to writing nonlinear notes, we're used to thinking about how things are similar, we're used to grouping things together, we're used to creating structures and flows. What we're focusing on with the process at level three is the quality. So, we're improving the quality of the connections and relationships that we're forming. We're also increasing the quality. And when I say quality, I'm talking about how intuitive the groups that we're forming are. Yeah, sure, we can connect this group to this group, we can connect these ideas to these other ideas, we can group these things together, sure, but which way of grouping is actually the best for us, which makes the most sense, which is the most intuitive, which feels like it's going to be stickier in our memory, which means number three, we have to spend time to identify Alternatives and then make an actual judgment on which one is the

best. For example, here's that little map that I made before at level two. And then here is the exact same map with essentially the exact same information but just grouped and structured differently. So at level three, I'm actually thinking about these alternative ways of structuring the information and arranging them in a way that makes more sense to me. At level three, our mind maps are becoming cleaner, more intuitive, more deliberate. The lines and the arrows and everything that I'm putting on there is more intentional. Now for most people, the difference between level two and level three may not seem like much. After all, we're still just grouping and organizing information. But the difference between level two and level three in terms of how much it affects your performance and results and memory and depth of understanding is probably more than the difference between going from Level zero all the way through to level two. Being able to create a level three mind map consistently is very uncommon and probably translates to a top 10% level of performance. In fact, the type of

thinking that you have to do for a level three mind map is so crucial that virtually any top 1 or 2% learner is going to be thinking in this way. Even if they're not using mind maps as the technique, mentally they're engaging in those same higher order thinking processes and patterns, which is why earlier I said that it is actually possible to do level zero, linear note-taking, but still get level three types of results. And let me show you how. So just going back to my article on metacognition, here I'm going to do the like pseudo level three note-taking with linear notes. As I do this, just notice how I'm spending a lot of time reading and um, and when I'm writing, I'm not actually just reading things and writing things down. I'm actually thinking about it and synthesizing it, and I'm doing all of that higher order thinking and grouping and thinking about how things are related to each other. I'm doing that all mentally as I read and

then I'm writing down like my entire synthesis and structure. So it's almost like a mini essay where I'm trying to explain all the relationships and nuances of the content that I've read. And this is basically how you're able to get some people that are using what seems like a pretty mediocre method of note-taking but they're getting great results because mentally what's going on is at a high level. But there are two specific reasons that you should not do this. First of all, it's honestly just much harder than doing the level three mind map because I'm having to do all the thinking in my head and all the processing. I can't track my thoughts and uh all the relationships that I'm thinking of on the mind map. So it's much much harder for me to actually create the connections and organize my thoughts. Being able to just literally write it down and brainstorm the ideas as I go uh is probably two or even three times faster and easier than trying to do it all mentally and then just forcing it.

back down into a linear set of notes again. This is actually also the reason why you should use mind maps to plan uh literature reviews and essays. It's also probably two or three times more time-consuming overall, not just when I'm writing the notes, but later when I go to review the notes. I'm forcing myself to have to read through this entire thing all over again to extract the meaning from it, whereas if I had just the Mind map, I can just glance at it to review the structure in like seconds or minutes. And even though the Mind map looks simpler, it's actually the same types of relationships and thoughts that were in the essay. The essay is not a more comprehensive set of notes at all. In fact, the essay probably doesn't even cover all of the relationships that I'd be able to express in the mind map. The level three mind map is incomparably simpler, faster, and more organized. This synthesized essay writing thing that I just did, you can use that as a revision technique later instead. Now if you found this video and you want

even more to help you master the art and science of learning. Then I've got a free weekly newsletter that I've created, where I've taken my decade of coaching and distilled what really works into bite-sized emails. Each email contains a key concept to help you improve your memory, your depth of understanding, your ability to apply your knowledge, as well as a practical takeaway or a challenge. It's completely free, and the concepts that I talked about in this video are also included in one of those newsletters, as well as other concepts that I have never made any videos about. If you're interested, I'll leave a link for you to join that in the description. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.

3 Levels of Mind Maps Every Student MUST Master

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Hey there! I'm Justin Sung, a learning coach (for the last decade), former doctor, top 1% TEDx speaker, education author, and social entrepreneur.💡

I'm also the co-founder and Head of Learning at iCanStudy, where we've pioneered the world's first cognitive retraining program, focusing on self-regulated higher-order learning (i.e. learning to learn REALLY efficiently) 🚀. We've helped transform over 15,000 learners across 120 countries 🌍

Before this, I spent 7 years working in the non-profit education space in a social enterprise I founded in NZ, helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds enter healthcare careers.

On my channel, I share evidence-based learning strategies and self-management methods that I've tried and tested for busy students and professionals.
