3rd century CE

The first use of a visual layout of information that I have seen mention of is the Tree of Porphyry – a form of presentation of a taxonomy that embodies a hierarchy, much as a mind map does. Porphyry of Tyre was a Greek philosopher who lived from c.233 to c.309, C.E. . This particular example is from a Philosophy course at the University of Washington.

692 CE

Then from Alex Gooding’s blog, this 692 CE graphical representation of the outline of the Bible:

Leonardo da Vinci 1452 – 1519

Often quoted, not least by Tony Buzan, as an early mind mapper but I haven’t been able to find any evidence.

<<= Once I had this here as da Vinci’s but I was wrong - Pablo Marin-Garcia of the European Bioinformatics Institute kindly gave me an authoritative reference to indicate that it was actually by Darwin – his first attempt at a tree of life, so it is not a mind map indicating connected ideas.

Can anyone point to evidence that da Vinci did anything like mind mapping?  Of course he illustrated his notes profusely, but that clearly is not enough.

1527

Next, from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana we have this example from a 1527 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy published by Panganino & Alessandro Paganini:

This is part of a section labelled a ‘moral schema of Hell’.

Also 16th century

Then, from a “Treatise on the virtues of excellence, and how one may acquire them.” by d’Anguerrande published some time in the 16th century:

This is from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.  Here we see the use of radiant organization of nodes, colour and single-word branches so familiar to Buzan mind mappers.

1664

This visual organiser from John Bunyan, he of Pilgrim’s Progress fame, is yet another religious one.

1924

Then from R. Clariana, I learnt of this reference, what is effectively mind mapping as described in 1924.  It is an excerpt from a letter written by Jacques Raverat to Virginia Woolf, dated September 1924 from Vence, (in the south of France, just 10 miles north of Nice):

“My dear Virginia, one of the things I find most difficult about writing is that it has to be essentially linear. I mean you can only write or read one thing at a time, and even memory doesn’t alter this fact. Now that’s not at all the way my mind works. When you write a word like “neopaganism,” for instance, it’s as if you threw a pebble into a pond. There are splashes in the outer air in every direction, and under the surface waves that follow one another into dark and forgotten corners of my past. You are not only a writer, but a printer, and you’ll see how difficult it would be to represent this odd phenomenon. One could perhaps, in the middle of a large sheet of paper, write the word “neopaganism” and then radially bits of sentences like this:

• Shame at the absurdities of my youth.
• Apologies if they really annoyed you.
• But almost impossible to believe that you can have taken them seriously.
• A desire to defend it.
• A desire to counterattack. Etc. Etc.

“And all this you see simultaneously, though even so it’s only what happens on the surface.” [as reported on NPR on May 23, 2004 by LINDA WERTHEIMER, host].

I would say that’s close to modern mind mapping, though it’s just a verbal description – we do not know if Raverat went on to put it into practice.

1931

Next, my thanks to M.H.F. who commented against my “Who invented mind mapping” article that a novel published in 1931 in England included this conversation:

“Mightn’t it be a good idea if everyone had to draw a map of his own mind – say, once every five years? With the chief towns marked, and the arterial roads he was constructing from one idea to another, and all the lovely and abandoned by-lanes that he never went down, because the farms they led to were all empty?

“And arrows showing the directions he wanted to go?” Quentin asked idly.
“They’d be all over the place,” Antony sighed…”

Google tells me the book was Charles Williams’ “The Place of the Lion”. Interesting hints and use of the words, but an early example that’s suggestive of visual mapping rather than being an actual example. Getting from that description to an actual practical mapping style is quite a step.

1957

Then there is a facinating business map from the great Walt Disney. I use the term business map with care. Although it looks very much like a concept map, I wouldn’t classify it as one, because instead of showing how concepts are linked and describing the relationships, it shows how business units of The Walt Disney Company contribute to each other’s activities. I wouldn’t myself call it a mind map either.

Aside from its sparkling clarity of business vision, it is interesting because of its date, 1957: Before Cornell University and Novak did their ground-breaking work on concept maps, before Buzan had turned his Mind to Mapping and even before Idea Sunbursting.

I came across this on Peter Duke’s site, dukeMedia. He saw it presented by a senior Disney executive.

(Click the image for a full-sized version)

1968

The next date I have is 1968.  That is when John (bjrg) attended the second Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course held in Australia.  And Evelyn Wood ”had been running her course in America for several years prior to it getting to Australia.”  This involved mapping the contents of material using “a technique identical with mind mapping in appearance.”  He describes it like this:

“Read a chapter as quickly as possible, not focusing on individual words but making visual sweeps of up to several lines at a time and even backwards (!) pacing oneself with a finger using curving sweeps down the page. Then quickly draw a map outlining the main concepts. THEN, rereading the material repeat the procedure again and again.

However, every time you drew a map you had to turn it face down and start a new one following the next reading, repeating everything you recalled and mapped and then adding new material. This whole procedure was repeated under timed conditions. So you had multiple readings of the same material at high speed and multiple recall procedures of the same material and multiple hand drawn maps of the basic content. At the end your reading speed was calculated and you completed a questionnaire on the content as a test.”

There was a lot of public interest because President J F Kennedy was supposed to have completed the programme.  As a result, John (bjrg, that is) was interviewed by a newspapaper at the time – he still has the clipping.

Now, isn’t that interesting . . . because recently (Jan 2011) a study reported that Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping but here we have a method that combines mapping and testing.

1974

In 1974, BBC TV ran a series by Tony Buzan called Use Your Head.  This introduced the term “Mind Map” for the first time as far as I have been able to find. But Buzan must surely have been working on this for a while, if the BBC were prepared to let him loose on a TV series.

There was a book of the same name.  Here is the very first illustration from that:

(Click the image for a full-sized version)

(According to the book credits “The diagrams … are by Brian Mayers Associates.”)

Vic

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