All day long, we are interacting with data and we are producing it. Most of the data is received without our conscious mind playing an active role in this. People usually think they are in control (most of the time) and they are making the decisions (most of the time). Fortunately, we are not.
The reason I write fortunately is because you don’t want to take part in making all the decisions. Can you imagine for example that you have to make the decision to breath, swallow,close your eyes when something almost hits it?
Of course not!
Thank God this is all done without us taking part in it.
Now most of the decisions we take are influenced by many filters we created in the past. This leaves us to the glorious task of choosing one out of perhaps 2 to 5 actions.
LEVEL 1: RAW DATA
As I wrote before, most of the information we encounter is just raw data. The important feature of this data is that it is unstructured. There is no conscious relationship between it and our network of information.
This is easy to understand by taking part in the following experiment:
Take a look out of your window. Look from left to right and then turn around (your back to the window).
Do that now…
OK, when you did that, tell me how many people you saw or how many birds, or perhaps things which are red.
Chances are, you will not be able to identify them that easily. You just saw a massive amount of raw data.
The things you may have remembered mean something to you. This is no longer data. It is something that belongs to the second level.
LEVEL 2: INFORMATION
The moment you are consciously or subconsciously organizing your data, you are creating information. Your information is connected to external data. You found something in your own network of information and were able to create a connection to the data. This transformed the data into information.
Another experiment:
Look out of your window and again look from let to right. This time, I want you to focus on cars only. After you did that, again turn around and continue reading.
Do that now…
RIGHT, how many cars did you see? If you didn’t see any, what were you looking at?
Our mind was focused on cars. It was able to focus and store the raw data in our network. You can probably tell me tomorrow how many cars you saw just now. The information is added to your memory. As you can see, most of the time conscious attention is needed to create information from data. This is not always the case.
During my memory training courses, we memorize the names of everybody present. The person who is introducing himself also gives us information about books and why he attends the training.
While focusing on the name we subconsciously store the other information as well. This is probably because we (1) connect the book to the name, and (2) connect the name to the information present in our mind.
Most people are able to recall the information easily because of the subconscious links.
Let’s move forward to level 3.
LEVEL 3: KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge can be defined as the (psychological) result of perception and learning and reasoning.
We take the information we collected and we start to think about it. We understand what it is and why it is important to us. You might even say that the information grows due to the connections to other areas in our information network.
You and I use knowledge for instance to understand what we have to do and when to do this.
It is great to know that fire is warm and can hurt you.
It is the knowledge and the structure of our information that helps us to move away from a fire or use it to cook our food.
- Data by itself is useless most of the time.
- Information helps us to find an answer to a quick or easy question.
- Knowledge enables us to move forward.
How we use this in Mind Mapping
Our mind seems to be very capable of creating information from data. Most of the time, the task of organizing and creating structure is requiring a little bit more attention. Knowledge is harder to create in our mind. Mindmaps help us in this.
Let us have a look at how you can use this in your mind mapping activities. Remember: The more conscious you are when doing this, the better the result will be (usually).
Level 1: Data
Write down the information you see, feel and interact with in any format you please. The moment you do that, you are already moving forward to level 2. After all, you are focusing on certain pieces of data which seem to be more important – this is your information.
Level 2: Information
The data from level one is still unstructured. Now you take the words, sentences, images and more that you found on level 1 and organize them. You created information.
Level 3: Knowledge
Create connections between the words. Connections are usually added where they give you the most benefits. Create branches, relationship lines, etc. Create structure in information. Create a overview of knowledge.
A little side step:
You could say that;
* Knowledge is structured information
* Information is connected data
This makes knowledge structured and connected data. This is exactly what the mindmap and visual map also show us!
Moving Forward
I always like to move forward. In this case, I think we can even identify at least one level higher than Knowledge. This fourth level is Intuition. But this is something for later on… perhaps… 
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