Thinking is the basic activity of the human brain. Generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual’s subjective consciousness. We know the meaning, we know the process. But how do we individually use it, do we make difference among separate types of thinking and do we know how to take advantage of them.

We often use creative, critical and visual thinking and brainstorming interchangeably. In order to develop our thinking techniques properly and use these different types of thinking most effectively, we need to make a difference among them and combine it appropriately.

So let’s look at what theory says:

Creative thinking is the merging of ideas which have not been merged before. Brainstorming is one form of creative thinking: it works by merging someone else’s ideas with your own to create a new one. You are using the ideas of others as a stimulus for your own.
Critical thinking is the process we use to reflect on assess and judge the assumption underlying our own and others ideas and efforts.

On the other hand, visual thinking is the common phenomenon of thinking through visual processing using the part of the brain that is emotional and creative to organize information in an intuitive and simultaneous way.

When compared all of these definitions we can conclude that in order to maximize your thinking potential, the best formula is to combine critical, creative and visual thinking.

How is this possible?

When you think creatively, you are generating list of new ideas. The creative thought is unpredictable, revolutionary, original. It often happens spontaneously. But in order to grow and become achievable, critical thinking is needed. Critical thinking is exercised to achieve applied creativity. This is logical, focused, conservative, practical and reasonable.

We can first generate pool of ideas using creative thinking, analyze their potential and drawbacks with critical thinking and visualize the idea as a whole.  If you are working on product development and problem solving, one solution is to include more members in the team that have different opinions and perspective of the problem. Maybe one of them will be more creative, and another will have the real picture of the current situation. Combined with visual tool like DropMind, the effectiveness will be increased in no time.

Just wanted to share a recent post for DropMind iPad version. The text was originally wrote by Jan Schultink on http://blog.ideatransplant.com

Triggered by the iPad touch interface, I started to use mindmapping for the first time in presentation design. Mindmapping is a process in which you jot down ideas and the connections between them quickly, and edit, clean up, and move things around later to get a more organized picture. I must say, it works a lot better than my previous approach: the pencil and a piece of paper. Especially since it is a lot harder to lose that piece of paper with your notes on it.

I purchased 2 iPad apps: iThoughtsHD and DropMind. iThoughtsHD was designed specifically for the iPad, and is the cheaper of the 2 ($10 versus $50 for DropMind). The DropMind app is an extension from an existing suite of desktop and web applications. The latter probably explains why it took a relatively long time for DropMind to come out with the app, a working iOS 4.2 version only appeared last week in the app store.

When reading my impressions remember that I am a light-weight mind mapper, just using it to structure ideas for a presentation. Reading around on the Internet it looks like mindmapping is a whole design approach taking things much further than I do.

For the purpose I use it for, iThoughtsHD works perfectly fine. The interface is straightforward and clean, and it is every easy to export mindmaps to PDF or sync them using a Dropbox account.

DropMind’s user interface looks a little bit more sophisticated with more graphical options. When you buy the iPad app, they also offer a perpetual license for the desktop client, and the web app. You can exchange mindmaps between the applications. There is a wide arsenal of tools available that I did not yet have time for to explore. The one drawback I found is that when you export a map to PDF or JPG, the resolution seems to be very low (not an issue with iThoughtsHD). I think this is a bug, or maybe I did not configure the settings correctly).

The bottom line. For basic presentation outline scribbles, iThoughtsHD works just fine and costs a lot less than DropMind. Personally, I tend to favor the DropMind app, because of the cross-platform integration and the ability to start using some of the more sophisticated tools available once I have come up the learning curve (on the condition that they fix the resolution of the exported images).