I made the following mind map at the end of the day yesterday to document what I had done that day. The source of information was a small notebook I carry to scribble incomplete thought during another day of living with dementia. This mind map took about 5 minutes for me to draw (I have a lot of practice) with a pen and a medium-sized page from my sketching pad.

Click on the image to expand it.

To make the ideas on the mind map identify streams of color. You can just take your map and go over it with color pens of various types. Like this …

While you see my computer-assisted mind maps on this blog site, I find the hand-drawn maps adequate for simple applications.

Try to draw a similar small map. Do you think you might remember the organized information better and encourage your mind to create associations or brainstorm new thoughts? That’s how it works for me. Using a few colored pencils makes the hand-drawn map even more useful.

When I want to capture and organize more information I use a computer program (either starting with a hand-drawn first draft) or just creating the map from scratch in a computer program.

Here is a computer-assisted map drawn from the first-draft above. It took me about 15 minutes to draw; I added a little more formatting because the map was going into a blog post rather than being just for my use. I could have drawn the computer-assisted map in 10 minutes if it was just for personal use.

Click on the image to expand it.

After you experiment for free and with materials you already have in just about every room you have in your house — and possibly already in your pocket — you might want to try to develop some maps in free programs or free demonstrations periods for more expensive programs. Programs are available for notebook computers and mobile devices. There are many apps for Macs and PC and iOs (Apple) and Android mobile devices.

I hope this post gives you a little better understanding of why I mind map with dementia to improve my ability to continue to think well. I have found over 10 years that I have been able to retain quite a bit of my cognitive functioning in spite of neurodegenerative disease.

Will this work for everyone? No. Is it worth a try? Well, it costs nothing to try as you already have that pencil and an old envelope around. And you could always work on a mind map during the television commercials instead of running to the refrigerator.

Give it a try.