Using Concrete Examples

Another essential technique for breaking knowledge down is creating concrete examples to deal with abstract concepts. This is useful because abstract ideas often feel vague and are consequently hard to grasp. Human minds are wired to remember specific, concrete things we see and hear, not abstract notions about theories we contemplate. Finding concrete examples that demonstrate abstract concepts is one of the best tools available to bring abstract notions down to Earth and make them easier to understand and remember.

As a quick example, suppose you are learning about the law of supply and demand. You will probably have some concrete examples in your textbook or lecture, but what about imposing one from your own life? Remember that time when you were trying to book a hotel in a city during peak tourism season? The prices were astronomical, and you almost had a hernia when you paid. That’s because there was a huge demand, and thus, the supply was shrinking. These factors caused prices to rise, because the market demand supported higher prices where there was short supply.

Take concepts you’ve learned and complete this process by yourself. You may not be able to come up with concrete examples for everything you’re learning, and in that case, you can use hypotheticals to literally construct examples that exemplify the point. Examples force application, and the funny thing about learning is that you’ll never know what you don’t know until you try to use it.

Like learning how to kick a soccer ball or drive a vehicle, we just have to find out for ourselves, and no amount of reading will ever replace firsthand experience. A concrete example is often the closest we will be able to get to much of the information and concepts we learn. Make it personal to you and you will never forget it.

Similar to analogies, the understanding required to actually construct an intelligible and illustrative example is deep. Simply going through this process will make you see the gaps in your knowledge, and also force you to revisit your entire understanding.

Suppose you are puzzled about the theory of gravity. Create an example of just how quickly you would fall to the ground if you jumped out of the second story, third story, and fourth story of a building. Visualize the concrete feeling of your stomach rushing to your throat, and you can grasp just how powerful the rate of gravity (9.8 meters per second) is. The theory of gravity is almost always described as Isaac Newton’s imagining of an apple falling on his head as a very real illustration of how gravity impacts everything on earth.

Whatever the concept, especially ones you are struggling with, strive to create your own concrete example.

For example, the mental state of courage is defined as “the ability to do something that frightens one.” This is fairly abstract. How might we understand this better?

An obvious example would be a soldier knowingly risking his life by going to war, but fighting bravely regardless. A more accessible example would be the anxiety we feel before and during a job interview or first date, an unease we all try to swallow and push through to take advantage of new opportunities. This example is particularly useful, as it relates an abstract concept to a near-universal human experience the learner can remember and relate to. The more concrete it is to us, the more we feel its impact and ultimately understand it.

Even though not all examples are perfect, they add depth and meaning to our understanding while solidifying abstract concepts into ideas we can easily grasp and remember.

Mind-Mapping

Finally, in your attempts to achieve polymathy, you’re bound to be overwhelmed by all the information you come across in your studies. Mind mapping is an invaluable technique that will help you organize the concepts, descriptions, and connections you discover between various topics in a manner that is both simple and easy to remember.

Mind maps will also help you give direction to your study since it makes it easier to know what you’ve covered already, how it all connects to each other, and which areas you need to know more about.

While there are several ways of illustrating your thoughts and work such as concept webs, spider diagrams, and others, mind mapping has several unique benefits to offer. It allows you to see the bigger picture because of the way mind maps are constructed, thus letting you stay focused on the important parts without getting sidetracked.

The colorful nature of mind maps also helps you retain more of the information you put down in them. Lastly, when studying complex topics, you can use several mind maps to efficiently break down and summarize different subtopics while keeping your material brief and uncluttered.

How to Make a Mind Map

Tony Buzan, the creator of mind maps, has some guidelines on how to effectively make mind maps. All you need for this exercise are some sheets of paper and at least three different colored pens or pencils.

Step 1

Start by placing the sheet of paper horizontally in front of you, zeroing in on the center of the page. You can either use an image related to your main topic or draw a circle and write it within that. Generally, it is a good idea to use symbols, images, and drawings to represent information to facilitate better retention. However, words and bubbles will also do just fine.

Step 2

Draw thick branches that stick out of your central image or bubble in different directions. These can be called your main branches. Use your colored pens to create some contrast, and draw additional bubbles at the end of these branches. Write or draw major subtopics within these bubbles. For example, if you’re studying philosophy, your branches can be about different subfields within philosophy, such as ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, epistemology, etc.

Step 3

Continue making branches within your subtopics and ensure that they are spaced out enough to minimize clutter. So if your subtopic is ethics, you can go further and note schools of thought such as utilitarianism and deontology. For political philosophy, you can have democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, and tyranny as sub-fields.

Step 4

Keep drawing new branches that further specify the content of the bubbles they extend from. For example, for utilitarianism you can simply write “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” whereas deontology can be a “rules-based theory.”

That’s all you need to do. It’s really this simple. Draw a circle in the center and keep making branches with more bubbles, which in turn have their own branches and bubbles, till you’ve filled up the entire sheet of paper. When tackling entire disciplines like philosophy or psychology, it might be helpful to make multiple mind maps. This would work exactly the same way, except the middle bubble would contain your sub-topic, such as political philosophy, instead of your larger area of interest. This will help you be more comprehensive in accumulating and organizing everything you’ve learned.

Here is another example of how you can make a mind map.

Step 1

Say you want to make a mind map about different political ideologies. You can write “political ideologies” in the central bubble and draw four branches from it

Step 2

These branches end with their own bubbles, within which you can write liberalism, communism, anarchism, and fascism. Alternatively, you can use symbols to denote them. Use the Statue of Liberty for liberalism, the face of Karl Marx for communism, Mussolini for fascism, and the symbol of anarchism which is a capital A with a circle around the middle.

Step 3

Within these, draw more branches and bubbles that extend from each of these subtopics. Fill in the relevant information through words or images. So liberalism can have the phrase “liberty, equality, fraternity” in one bubble, private property in another, free and fair elections in the third one, so on and so forth. Similarly, communism can have “state control over the economy,” “classless society,” “abolition of religion,” etc.

Step 4

Continue the above process until you reach the ends of your sheet of paper.

Let’s consider one final example of how to create a mind map for your studies.

Step 1

Assume you want to draw a mind map to study US history. Write “US History” in a bubble around the middle of your paper and extend at least six branches from it. You can choose to use more depending on how extensively you’re studying the topic, but for our purpose six will suffice.

Step 2

then lump the rest into post-: 1990

Step 3

As before, extend branches from these subtopics within US history. For the first part, you may want to cover Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims’ interaction with Native Americans, etc. Carry on with major events from the Revolution like the Boston Tea Party, its various causes, the adoption of democracy as a form of rule, and so on. Similarly proceed with the Civil War, World Wars, and Cold War along with their landmark events, notable incidents, outcomes, and statistics.

Step 4

Continue adding more depth to your points and include sufficient detail so you can come back to the map and still glean most of the relevant information pertaining to this topic.

Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Mind Maps

The most basic mind map can be made using just a pen or pencil and with bubbles and branches on paper. However, such a map is unlikely to be memorable, which is one of the key reasons for using mind mapping as a technique in the first place. There are several things you can do to enhance your mind maps and maximize how useful they are in your efforts toward becoming a polymath. The following tips and tricks will help you in that endeavor:

Minimize the number of words you use. Keep the information inside your bubbles brief and to the point.

Maximize visual aids like colors, symbols, drawings, etc. You can also use written words in different ways. So one main branch from your central bubble can have text written only in lowercase, while another has text that is exclusively uppercase.

Emphasize certain words or parts of the text you’ve included in your map to exhibit their importance.

Make the main branches thicker, and gradually reduce the thickness as you proceed deeper into the mind map. This is another visual cue that will help you remember the hierarchy of your information.

Don’t restrict yourself to bubbles; use different shapes at the end of your main branches and for that entire part of your mind map. These shapes can help you differentiate the various parts of your map and recall them more clearly.