This is the Age of Intelligence – so start mind-mapping.

ALEC HOGG: Well, Tony Buzan is know globally as Mr Brain, through his invention of Mind Mapping and popularising tools that aid memory and creativity. Indeed, David Shapiro has even been on a course of Tony's. I went on a  course that Richard Broome did here in Johannesburg, and he was trained by Tony Buzan as well. He graced our studio a little earlier today, and I asked him how his fascination with the brain had developed.

TONY BUZAN: I studied the Romans, I studied the Greeks, I studied the Japanese, historical memory techniques, the Indian, the Chinese - and they all turned out to be fundamentally the same. So one of the discoveries I made along the way was that the human brain is the same everywhere on the planet, and it works out how to work fundamentally in the same way. And the mind maps were just putting it all together. So I studied the societies, I studied the Greek brains, which Da Vinci already mentioned, I studied Thomas Edison, Elizabeth I, the hundred top geniuses in history, and they basically all worked in the same way. So it all began to come down to fundamental principles - that if you use them, then your brain changes.

ALEC HOGG: Why is it that we've seemingly gone backward? You can think of the way that the memories of the Romans and the Greeks are so superior to what we have today, and Da Vinci, Michelangelo, great geniuses of that time - we don't see too many of them replicated.

TONY BUZAN: No. we went down a cul de sac, a wrong turning, and that wrong turning was in thinking that images were bad and that we thought with words. And the fact is we don't think with words. We primarily think with images, and use the words to carry, like little boats, the images from brain to brain, from you to me, from us to the listeners. It's the images that do it. We thought that images were wrong, so if people were using images for their memory they must be wrong. So we just went down this ridiculous and inappropriate path and we've now discovered that, coming back, taking all the information from the previous societies and blending it into what is a new revolution. In Malaysia recently the Minister of Higher Education with me and the International Conference on Thinking formally announced that the Information Age, which everybody thinks we are in, has passed. So has the Knowledge Age, which everyone thought we were in, passed. We are now in - this is formally declared - the Age of Intelligence. So we used to think in the Agricultural Age agriculturally, then the Industrial Age we thought industrially, then we though informationally, and most people still do. Then a few began to think knowledgably, and now it's announced that we are about to begin to think intelligently.

ALEC HOGG: At last! It's fascinating, though - I was again in Davos this past year with an American professor who said "People just don't think any more". And in fact her thesis was that only academics and journalists have the time to be able to sit down and think much.

TONY BUZAN: I think everybody has the time to be able to think. The time is there. It's always been there. It's a matter of what we decide to do with it.

ALEC HOGG: So how do you start? Many chief executives listen to this programme. They have a day which starts at 6am, then finishes at, say, 7pm, meetings all the way through. They don't get too much time for thinking there. How would you suggest that someone like that changes their life?

TONY BUZAN: I do a lot of work with leading people. By the way, Bill Gates and Al Gore are now mind mapping.

ALEC HOGG: Did you teach them?

TONY BUZAN: I taught the person who taught Bill Gates, and I taught the person who taught Al Gore. I was not actually aware that Al was mind mapping until I read Time magazine, and he was on the front cover and inside they had a picture of him in his studio. Above his head was the mind map. And it actually said Al Gore uses mind maps to control his global initiatives.

ALEC HOGG: So to start along that road, just start mind-mapping.

TONY BUZAN: You start mind mapping, and you map your day. So you put your goal for the day in the middle, and maybe the goal for that particular day if you are a CEO is marketing, and you've got six meetings on marketing. You put a marketing symbol in the middle, then have a branch for each one of those meetings, and if you think you've got six meetings, you make it seven, and one of those meetings is with yourself. And the really smart chieftains, if you like to call them that, always have a meeting with themselves, and of all the seven that's the most important.

ALEC HOGG: Fascinating discussion, and the full 10 minutes of that podcast will be up on the Moneyweb website in a little while. Indeed, if you happen to be living at Pinnacle Point or invested in that poor company, you'll also be able to pick up the full 10 minutes of that discussion with Hennie Pretorius, the chief executive. Both of those on the Moneyweb website.

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