Isn't Mind Mapping Always Visual?

The phrase visual mind mapping may seem a bit redundant, since the whole idea of mind maps in the first place is supposedly to take information out of the linear, prose-based format and put it into a more pictorial form. The way information is usually presented, in paragraph style on a page, is claimed to make a person use the left side of the brain. Using mind map methods, on the other hand, supposedly caters to the right brain, which absorbs and processes information in whole pictures rather than straight lines.

In the Tony Buzan mind mapping style for example it is always stressed how the whole point of mind mapping is to reflect externally what goes on inside your head - in an organic non-rigid manner, using curved lines, colors and images. So isn't the "visual" aspect pretty much already included in the whole idea of mind maps?

Essentially, yes.

Yet some mind map software does seem more "visual" than others, and some users still prefer something that reflects a more linear style, even in a mind map. For example, when Tony Buzan and Chris Griffiths came out with their iMindMap software in 2006, many business people criticized it for looking too "cartoon-like" with its colors and wavy branches connecting the concepts.

This type of visual mind mapping, in their opinion, had gone too far down the organic road to be usable in a business meeting. As a result, iMindMap (this software has now reached version 4.1 and comes in three diffferent editions) now has one mode that business people can switch into without the colors, something that more closely reflects the flowchart style so beloved by conservative businesses over the years.

If you ask me it is their loss that they think the curved lines and happy colors are not suitable for business, because it is both mine and Tony Buzan's opinion my experience that this is part of what makes mind maps so effective.

In any case, every mind mapping program seems to stand at some point on a spectrum running from a quite linear flowchart style at one end to a lushly colored pictorial style at the other. The program called Gliffy would be placed more toward the "flowchart" end, with its organized, straight, parallel lines and reduced color scheme. But the software called NovaMind stands proudly at the opposite end of that spectrum, as a distinctly visual mind mapping kind of program, with jewel-colored branches gleaming against a black background.

There's the potential risk of simply returning to a linear way of thinking by returning to a more straight-line flowchart style. Yet even a flowchart is still a visual map. It may not allow quite the extravagant wandering of ideas that something like the early iMindMap program did. And yet it still creates a visual mind mapping of ideas and reveals connections between those ideas or between branches of ideas. So even though this type of software is less free form, it still engages some degree of right-brain thinking.