Overwhelm

Post Reply New Topic

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uber-

über- prefix

variants: or less commonly uber-
Definition of über-

1 : being a superlative example of its kind or class : super- übernerd
2 : to an extreme or excessive degree : super- übercool
History and Etymology for über-

German, from über over, beyond, from Old High German ubar — more at over

This is an example of a Tony Buzan type of mind map - it could be used to memorize your week's schedule



Another - could be used to study for a test



This is not a Tony Buzan type of mind map - it has no pictures and could not be used for memorizing things very well



A Tony Buzan mind map should be less like a drawing or chart and more like a memory palace:



The kind of mind maps I do are not quite up to Tony Buzan standards.

Ah....so uber just means super-duper. I thought it might be a brand name like those taxis.

Yes they certainly look like Buzan mind maps. As you say, pictures are easier to remember than a load of text hanging from a tree. But although I've got a Tony Buzan mind-maps book (The Ultimate Book Of Mind Maps), I can't see that it really explains how I would use them to do any good.

I do keep a "notes" document open on my desktop, which is seldom far away, but have you thought of a notebook? A simple wooden hexastylus is readily available with write and delete functions on opposite ends. The display units can be arranged in any pattern, or even made into 3-D objects.

^
Do you mean a pencil?

Yes, I was quoting from the Har de Hardware Review's entry on the Nurdpack.

I'm not familiar with that, and all the Web would tell me was about some kind of flower, so I had to resort to general intelligence.

I was until recently carrying a sheet of A4 paper, folded into about 8, in my trouser pocket, along with a ballpoint pen, but the idea has fallen into disuse. The paper kept getting hard to write on after only a few weeks of use. And most of the stuff written on it turned out to be useless because either I'd remember anyway or the list would get so long that I could never be bothered to go through it to see what I'd written down. Another time I was in a car at night and couldn't see well enough to write. Then my skin got sensitive to anything hard in my pockets so I removed the pen. I'd use a shirt pocket but it's summer and I often just wear a t shirt, and my shirt pockets are usually a little too small for pens, and they get in my way, a bit like a lanyard does. But before those problems came up, it sometimes proved useful.

I was using the folded paper when I was a boy. By the time I was 26, I had a pocket-size ring binder that I had customized with index tabs, card pockets, and some reference pages.

Dumb me -
Tony Buzan can be found on youtube -
And his TED talk has a Tony Buzan Mind Map - made by Tony Buzan

Some people like the "Hipster PDA"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_PDA

The idea is low-tech is sometimes better. A similar idea (if you are in an office environment) use a basic white-board then take a picture with your cell phone and add it to your documentation (in an e-mail or on the wiki, etc).

Much faster than a lot of art/power-point type software - and easier to brainstorm with.

My daughter tried the bullet journal

https://www.thelazygeniuscollective.com ... et-journal

I mostly stick to putting notes into my phone/pda as plain text - but I arrange the text in certain ways and add key words.

I have gotten good at transcribing whiteboard diagrams to text in outline form, with a few tricks.

When I sit down at the beginning of the day and try to figure out what to do without "going down rabbit holes" sometimes I just turn into Alice - no paper or notes technique can help. A simple mind map is the closest thing I can think of - on paper with a pencil or pen. Sometime I use colored highlighters as colored markers - but more colors kind of makes me crazy sometimes - two is about my limit.

I did a computer executive function test once and discovered that while most people's working-memory can handle 7+/-2 (5 to 9) chunks of WM min can only reliably handle 3. If I can chunk 3 items in each chunk I can fake 9.

When my brain starts making connections faster and faster there is no hope. I end up having to switch to thought stopping or DBT TIPP. I start by putting my hands over my eyes. I have to be careful not to catastrophize or it can kick off an anxiety or panic attack. The big problem is when I really need to get stuff done - just "showing down and regrouping" feels wrong somehow. It is crazy making. I told my shrink that I am sometime afraid that the ideas will keep going and the focus will keep scattering and I will end up in a real mess or crisis.

If you have ever seen a stage effect where there are four spotlights that pan around and then all focus at the same spot and then pan again - my focus is like that - I am afraid that the spot lights will spread out and just keep going - carrying parts of me and my mind with them. Or sometimes it feels like it might - or that is my fear.

I wouldn't knock them if some find them useful. In my case I went through a few "complicated" methods like that when I was younger, and I kept getting sucked into trying to design perfect storage-and-retrieval and reminder systems, and the detour of all that stuff defeated the original object of the exercise, which was to save time and effort. The folded paper trick was probably the only "system" that didn't do that to me, being too simple to get very involved with. I think my last attempt to "really get organised" was about 10 years ago. Somewhere under one of my heaps of junk lies an A5 see-through plastic photo wallet containing various bits of paper for at-a-glance consultation. I intuitively made up different categories for the different pages as I went along. I don't know why it didn't work, but like all my organising systems, it fell into disuse very quickly. These days I don't think much about getting organised, I just muddle through and don't really worry about it much.

What works for me, inasfar as anything works for me at all, are the folded paper, Thunderbird Lightning task reminders, and my own brain, which probably isn't all that bad at remembering things which are particularly important to it. I also remember with fondness an inexpensive digital watch that had multiple alarms. That was actually doing some good - it wasn't cumbersome like most of the other methods, yet it was nearly always with me. But the batteries started to conk out and it would lose its memory every time, and it was so cheaply-made that when I replaced the batteries, the flimsy gasket fell apart and it was no longer remotely damp-resistant. So near, and yet so far. I suppose a smartphone might do the same job better, but I'm wary of smartphones.

Fascinating. I couldn't relate to the first part at all, till he started talking about that mango, and that really helped me to see how mind maps do reflect the way I think. I also found his idea about babies being natural experimental scientists very much akin to my own notions about how adults are in some ways degenerated children, and his idea that everybody is potentially quite a genius has been a soap-box theme of mine for decades.

I still find his Ultimate Book Of Mind Maps pretty horrendous though, perhaps because he uses too many whizz-bangs and hyperboles instead of just explaining it in a sober manner, and I couldn't see the content for the presentation. Strange, because his spoken material doesn't smack so strongly of the snake-oil salesman. He does present some real content.

Here's a video from when he was much younger. Again, he's fairly sober about it, but I find it hard to keep my attention on it when he spends all that time overexplaining the idea that the universe is much bigger than a person, or whatever he was trying to say before I lost patience and left the room.

Tony Buzan's first published books were about speed reading. He has published many many books and has made a lot of money. He also has gone around the world giving lectures and seminars. Many of his books are about how to memorize things using the memory palace and other techniques. If you understand that as context the ideas needed to use memory palace naturally lead to a lot of the details of Mind Maps.

Josh Foer who was one time U. S. Memory Olympics Champion wrote a book called "Moonwalking with Einstein". It is a good book about memory and talks about Tony Buzan (and others).

According to Wikipedia, such mind maps have some effectiveness, but it's more limited than Mr. Buzan seems to say they are. It seems that they benefit art students more than IT or computer technology students (I'm rather geared to studying technology myself), and that low-ability students got more out of the technique than high-ability students did (and I suspect I'm relatively high-ability). That would seem to go some way towards explaining why in spite of my efforts I have yet to seen any benefit.

Back in 1974 when I was struggling with a college course in medical laboratory science, I tended to blame myself for failing to benefit from his TV series, because he did rather strongly suggest that his methods will significantly help anybody, and he did seem to know what he was talking about. In a way it's sad that he (or his estate) makes money from it, because the profit motive usually puts pressure on a seller to play down the limitations of the product and to play up the benefits. I see that in his "Ultimate..." book, he makes a lot of the left-brain / right-brain thing, yet when I check other sources I'm told that such theories have significant flaws and aren't a great deal of practical use. I also kept getting a strong urge to abandon his book because when I'd read enough of a verbose explanation to get the point, it tended to be something pretty easy and obvious, so I got the feeling I was investing a lot of time just to get told in a baby-steps way things that I already knew. I'm not saying what he sells has no value, just that for people such as myself, the value might be quite limited. And he might have written better books - the accompanying book to the TV series looks better than mine. I'll probably persevere with the mind map thing here and there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map#Effectiveness

Like anything practice seems to help a lot. Also creating a mental "vocabulary" is important - the brain is better at memorizing things that can connect to things you already know. The fact that people can use memory palace to memorize a deck of cards or a dozen decks of cards with it shows that it works. But doing so well requires a lot of practice and encoding the cards using P-A-O which are memorized before. My son is a bio major and some of his classes require massive amounts of memorization. I found the "Moonwalking with Einstein" book and we read it, but it didn't really improve his grades. We are looking at a piece of software named Anki. Anki helps with phased repetition. My son was able to use elaboritive encoding to memorize some numbers for physics class, but other than that it didn't really "click" for him. He either didn't want to, or couldn't make use of the techniques in real life. I think it related to his ASD "overwhelm" which is different than mine - but I struggle to understand his ASD overwhelm - even though I am learning to be more aware of mine - and deal with it without snowballing. But I am only still just learning. DS's classes increasingly require a lot of memorization and also EF (executive function) and WM (working memory) skills. Basically the gap between demand and the capability keeps growing. I am trying to deal with me - and help him to deal with him. At age 20 he is resistant to "dad helping" but he cannot or will not find a way to over come his academic challenges because he is spending more and more time re-creating from his overwhelm. Sometimes I wonder if I should be doing less - then he will have to figure things out and feel more responsibility and self-worth and agency. Or if I should be doing more - then I can block and level the playing field for him and he can shine with his talent and ability. I wish I could find the key that could unlock things for him. And I have to keep working on me. It is hard being a dad. It is hard being a non-NT dad with a non-NT son (two actually).

^
I messed around with Anki or something very similar to it a few years ago, but couldn't get it to work. I might give it another go, as I've always thought there may be something in the idea of timing flashcards to make the best use of study time. Sorry your son doesn't seem too interested in it. With me, if I've proactively found for myself a possible solution to a problem I have, I'm motivated to persevere with it. If somebody else suggested it, for some reason I tend to feel hostile towards giving it a fair chance. But maybe it just didn't work very well for him when he tried it?

Yes young people do seem to go through this anti-parent stage. Something to do with establishing their identity as adults in their own right, I think. Even my son went through that. I remember how it used to put him off whenever I showed any enthusiasm about helping him.

Years ago (before Buzan), I read about a memory aid where you learn a set of picture associations for the numbers 1 to 10 - 1 = sun, 2 = shoe, etc. Initially that worked for memorizing numbers, but when I tried to use it for more than one thing, it ceased to work so well. Something inside seemed to say "here we go again with that stupid "sun-shoe-tree" thing." I just couldn't muster up the interest to picture a tree with a shoe hanging from it or whatever, not over and over again. The essence of the technique seems valid enough - the brain remembers vivid pictures much more easily than it remembers cold strings of digits (except for some Aspies who can memorize numbers with ease - I've never been willing or able to). But when I try to memorize tons of vivid pictures, that too quickly becomes difficult.

I've heard that the mediaeval minstrels and ballad singers used to use that palace technique for learning those long ballads. I never got the knack of it myself. I memorize song lyrics just by singing them occasionally until they stick. Luckily I'm not part of any group that sets songs for me to learn or dictates the pace at which I have to learn them, so if I have trouble learning a song, I just abandon it. With one I've recently been learning, I've got most of it without much difficulty but there's one verse that doesn't seem to stick, so my plan is to leave that verse out. It's not a very well-known song so nobody will notice. I think one thing that makes a huge difference is the level of enthusiasm. Because I choose my own songs, I'm always enthusiastic from the start - otherwise why would I bother to learn it?

If only schools and colleges were like that. There's a method of education called student-centred learning where the only role of the teacher is to answer questions. The students just study what they want to study, at their own pace, and approach the teacher when they're stuck. Ever since I heard of that method I've considered conventional education backward and unnatural.