The concept of mind maps is raised pretty often when talking about learning and acquiring understanding of a concept, but it always bothered me.

I feel like it's simply an esthetic take on a flat tree structure, with pictures. There is no loss of information when going from one form to another, just a different use of the space.

In particular, mind maps usually offer no way of connecting sibling branches together (diamond shape), so it's actually pretty limited compared to a graph of nodes.

https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/111/193/431/255/027/638/original/4e381b84aa94e160.jpg