The potential for brilliance is in every single normal brain.

(Listen to the interview by using the links above)

MONEYWEB [Alec Hogg]:  It's the 4^th of August 2009 and in this special podcast, Tony Buzan is with us in the studio.  Tony, 1974, the introduction of mind maps, 250m people, certainly at last count, use mind maps - has that been growing?

TONY BUZAN:  It has been growing I am pleased to say, exponentially.  So obviously it started off with one which was me, when I was inventing it, and then it took a little while for it to get to 100 and then quite quickly to 1 000 and it is now estimated that over 3bn people are aware of them, so people know what a mind map is and 250m are using them a lot.

MONEYWEB:  Are you coming to talk about mind maps here in South Africa?

TONY BUZAN:  I am, I'm actually coming to do public courses at the Sunnyside Park Hotel.  I'm going to be training - and this is particularly exciting for me - certified mind map users, so people who want to be certified to use a mind map say in a special area, if they want to be able to mind map project management, if they want to be able to mind map change management, if they want to be able to mind map life skills, they go through the course and then they are qualified to use mind maps in that area.

MONEYWEB:  I'm sure you've been asked this 100 times, but perhaps as succinctly as possible, how would you describe a mind map?

TONY BUZAN:  A mind map is a reflection on the page of the way the brain thinks, so we don't think in words, we think in images.  If I say to you now, "mango", you don't see a little computer printout saying m-a-n-g-o - you know, it's this beautiful central image in your mind of the fruit and the smells and the sensation and the mind map just puts that kind of thinking on the page.  So you put a little image in the centre and then you branch out with trees like a branch, you use colours and images throughout and you have a note that is like the kind of note that Leonardo da Vinci used to make, except that it's more structured and more organised and anyone can do it, in fact everyone does do it all the time in their heads, it's just a matter of getting it out on the page.

MONEYWEB:  Well, Tony, I met you for the first time in 1993 in Davos and very shortly afterwards started adopting mind maps and they certainly have been a huge benefit to me and in fact David Shapiro who is on our radio programme every evening, often tells people about these strange pictures that I draw ...

TONY BUZAN:  [Laughs]

MONEYWEB:  ... but clearly they work, they do!

TONY BUZAN:  Yeah, they certainly do.

MONEYWEB:  You were a one-time journalist, I read...

TONY BUZAN:  I was, yes.

MONEYWEB:  At The Telegraph in England.

TONY BUZAN:  Yes, that's right.  When I was a young lad I was working with The Telegraph, in the travel section, and that was in the time period when I was completing my development of mind maps and I began to use them to do my own articles, to write my own book, my first book I did, using mind maps.

MONEYWEB:  Where did the fascination with the brain come from?

TONY BUZAN:  From having mine not work very well, so as I was in school and university I was noticing that my marks were generally going down a bit, my effort was having to go up, the volume of mind notes was higher, and I went to the university library one day and I said, "I need a book on how to use my brain" and the librarian pointed to the medical section and she said, "The medical section is over there".  I said, "I don't want to take my brain out, you know, I don't want to operate on it - I want to learn how to operate it" and she said, "Oh there are no books on that" and I thought, what, you know, we have operations manuals for washing machines and nothing for the brain?  And that peaked my interest - I was already beginning to get interested - but that just made me think, you know, this is a wide open field.

MONEYWEB:  From reading your books, you did a lot of looking back into the past, how for instance the Romans, the great Roman orators of Cicero, never had notes, but they could recite these amazing speeches for hours on end!

TONY BUZAN:  Yeah, yeah, exactly, I mean 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 altogether.  So I studied the societies, I studied the great brains, Da Vinci we've already mentioned, I studied Thomas Edison, Elizabeth I, the 100 top geniuses in history, and they all basically worked in the same way.  So it all began to come down to fundamental principles, that if you use them, then your brain changed.

MONEYWEB:  Hmm.  Why is it that we've seemingly gone backwards?  You can think of the way that the memories of the Romans and the Greeks is 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 then 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.  So we thought that images were wrong and so if people were using images for their memory, then they must be wrong and so we just went down this ridiculous that inappropriate path and we've now discovered that, come back and we're now 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're in, has passed, so has the Knowledge Age, which everybody thought we were in, they've passed.  We are now in, this is formally declared, the Age of Intelligence.  So we used to think in the Agriculture Age, agriculturally, then in the Industrial Age we thought industrially, then we thought informationally and most people still do.  Then a few began to think knowledgeably and now it's announced that we are about to begin to think intelligently - at last!

MONEYWEB:  It's fascinating that!  I was again in Davos this past year with an American professor who said, "People just don't think anymore" 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, you just have to take it.  You know the time is there, it's always been there - it's a matter of what we decide to do with it.

MONEYWEB:  So how do you start?  Let's just say many chief executives listen to this programme, they have a day which starts at six am, finishes say at seven pm, meetings all the way through, they don't get too much time for thinking there - how would you suggest someone like that changes their life?

TONY BUZAN:  I do a lot of work with the leading people and that includes in fact, by the way, that Bill Gates and Al Gore are now mind mapping, and many, many...

MONEYWEB:  Did you teach them?

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

MONEYWEB:  So to start along that road, just start mind mapping?

TONY BUZAN:  You start mind mapping and you mind map your day.  So you put the goal for your day in the middle, you know, maybe the goal for that particular day, if you're a CEO, is marketing and you've got six meetings on marketing, so you put a marketing symbol in the middle, you 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 would like to call them that, always have a meeting with themselves and of all the seven, that's the most important because that's the person who is having a meeting with all the others, so that person has to meet with himself, got to create that time space for your own brain.

MONEYWEB:  Tony, you've written a lot of books - how many so far?

TONY BUZAN:  I'm pleased to say that it's 100 not out!

MONEYWEB:  Wow!  Congratulations.  But you're best known for mind maps and of course the work you've done on memory as well, but what about creativity?  We're at a time in the world's history when we need creative solutions to a system that seems to have gone wrong.

TONY BUZAN:  I have written a little book, the first of many books I'm going to be writing on creativity, called "The Power of Creative Intelligence" and creativity, interestingly, is very, very similar to memory.  People had assumed that they were opposite and even two weeks ago when I was in Germany, somebody said "Ah yes, but creative people have bad memories and people with good memories are not creative".  Totally untrue, the opposite is true, that memory is not stuffing things boringly into your brain in lists!  Memory is your imagination, it's your association, it's your ability to use your senses and that's creativity and if you think about it, when you try to remember something, remember someone's face, whatever it is, you are re-creating the past.  So memory and creativity are the same and creativity is essential in this age of intelligence.

MONEYWEB:  Well there's many Tony Buzan books - Exclusive Books, CNAs, amazon.com - it's very easy to pick one up, but...

TONY BUZAN:  You can go on my own website...

MONEYWEB:  Your own website, well certainly there are many references to the work that you've done over the years.  Just to close off with, what are you hoping to achieve with South Africa?  It's a developing country, it's a country that does need perhaps a kick ahead.

TONY BUZAN:  Ja, I've always loved South Africa, that's why I've been here so many times.  What I'm hoping to achieve here is number one, the awareness, so thank you for this programme, that people become aware of what's going on about the brain and aware of the mind map and how it can be used.  The other thing I'm really, really interested in is making sure that the education system has learning how to learn and the development of the children's intelligences as a central theme in his future education.

MONEYWEB:  Where do you stand on the scientific philosophies around a bell curve, that you get some people who really just aren't that clever, and then people at the other end who are super intelligent?

TONY BUZAN:  I stand on those by stomping on them and squashing that bell curve.  Scientific American actually backed me up recently with a front page cover that said, "How brilliance arises in every one of us", not in that one or this one or them or those, but in everyone, and if the brain is trained well, it grows miraculously.  If it's trained badly, like any plant, it dies.  So...

MONEYWEB:  So we all have it in us?

TONY BUZAN:  The potential for brilliance is in every single normal brain.

MONEYWEB:  And is the potential for defeating diseases like Alzheimer's, there too?

TONY BUZAN:  Absolutely, absolutely.  Alzheimer's, interestingly, the main theory about that at the moment in the scientific community is that it is primarily triggered by a lack of mental and by a lack of physical activity and stretching and engagement.

MONEYWEB:  Tony Buzan - food for thought.

The SAfm Market Update with Moneyweb is broadcast on SAfm 104-107fm, weekdays at 18:00 to 18:30.

COMMENTS

  responses to this article

View disclaimer

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Name:
Surname:
Email:
Subject:
Comment:

if (theForm['attribute_1327'].value == '' || theForm['attribute_1327'].value == '0') { ccs.ugc.capture309764.addValidationError(309764,'Comment:',1327, 'is mandatory') };

View disclaimer