Because I’m working on a software tool to complement the Zoom Thinking concept, I’m naturally curious about what else is out there.
I’ve looked (and acquired) a number of mind-mapping tools, some of them very neat. I especially like MindNode for its clean simplicity.
So far I’ve only found one tool that reflects my own thinking about thinking: Scapple. Here is the key to how Scapple differs from conventional mind mapping (I quote from the website):
“There’s no built-in hierarchy at all, in fact—in Scapple, every note is equal, so you can connect them however you like. The idea behind Scapple is simple: when you are roughing out ideas, you need complete freedom to experiment with how those ideas best fit together.”
This is a refreshing change, and much closer to how natural thinking works: we begin with a jumble, not a heading. Headings emerge from the jumble, not the other way around.
In fact I venture to speculate that this sequence reflects the slow evolution of human cognition over the millennia. Gradually human brains learned to recognize patterns—that is, similarities in diverse objects and events. We started to group things and develop a sense of categories. Next, by naming these categories, we could quickly manipulate large numbers of ideas. Finally, we evolved categories of categories, in ever-growing hierarchies.
Scapple doesn’t address this process, but it starts at the right place.