Useful cognitive overhead

As I’ve reported before, I started mind mapping keynotes not as a function of filling the blog, but for listening better.  That is, without the extra processing requirement of processing the talk into a structure, my mind was (too) free to go wandering. I only posted it because I thought I should do something with it!  And I’ve realized there’s another way I leverage cognitive overhead.

As background, I diagram.  It’s one of the methods I use to reflect.  A famous cognitive science article talked about how diagrams are representations that map conceptual relationships to spatial ones, to use the power of our visual system to facilitate comprehension. And that’s what I do, take something I’m trying to understand, some new thoughts I have, and get concrete about them.  If I can map them out, I feel like I’ve got my mind around them.

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