Mind Maps are definitely not a great way to be a 'canonical store' of information, but that does not mean that they are useless at all. I find them to be great

Mind Maps are definitely not a great way to be a 'canonical store' of information, but that does not mean that they are useless at all. I find them to be great at brainstorming, for example. Dumping several related aspects of a project into the mind map feels very intuitive to me, no overhead involved at all. And it eases the cognitive load of several concepts floating around your subconscious and taking up your brain CPU. For learning, I plain disagree with you. I even see your point that information may be better 'first presented' to a learner in other ways (although I've had good experiences with mind maps being a 'discovery' tools as well). However, learning has other moments other than the discovery. Mind maps are great at teaching how concepts fit together, and also good as a studying tool in the recall moment (rather than linear notes). You may also view them as an 'index' to information presented elsewhere. Once a book was posted here on HN which had a 'graph of chapter dependencies' inside the book, which people loved. A graph of chapter dependencies is at least very close to a mind map. By the way, since you mentioned UDC and DDC, even library science and information science courses do teach mind maps as tools as well. Because they have their uses, even if you know UDC or DDC.