The brain works by associating words, pictures and colours. To free ourselves, we must ditch the oppressive shackles of notes and lists.
WE HAVE all been there: staring at a blank page as a deadline looms, rifling through pages of scribbled notes before a big exam, or sitting stumped and silent when the boss expects creativity on tap.
When your brain freezes up, there's only one thing to blame, according to self-made mind guru Tony Buzan - and that's linear thinking.
It's the enemy of creative freedom, of powerful memory, of wider comprehension. If you can just ditch the shackles of ordered lists and notes, he argues, a world of innovation awaits.
"The universe and nature - and our thinking and brains therefore - were not designed to be linear, they were designed to be beautifully structured, incredibly and fantastically interlinked and very organic and creative, both in design and function," says Buzan.
He's just arrived in Malaysia to speak about Mind Mapping, a non-linear technique for organising information that he developed in the 1960s when his university exam results were headed south.
"The worse I was doing, the more notes I took, because I thought that notes were the way for me to succeed," says Buzan, who hails from England and studied in Canada. "In desperation before exams, I would frantically go through the notes, taking out the key words, the nuggets of information that I needed in order to get the information into my head."
He soon realised the copious notes themselves were his undoing. "I began to analyse them and I calculated that the average number of key words in my average page was less than 10 per cent. I realised that memory doesn't work with sentences, it needed key ideas and images."
Buzan started to box off the keywords, adding images and colour codes, and he organised the information in a branching structure that radiates out from a central hub.
"The central branches are the main ideas and then the second, third, fourth level branches extend and radiate from those main ideas," he explains, delighting in the coincidence that the end result looks like a diagram of a neuron, or brain cell.
He refined the mapping technique, developing rules or "laws" to help further unlock creativity, and started to popularise the approach through television series in the 1970s. A quarter century and almost 100 books later, Buzan is a globally recognised name in the fields of memory and mind enhancement, heads a well-marketed empire and has registered the Mind Map name as a trade mark.
But how original is it? Creative minds, including Leonardo Da Vinci, have long associated images with words, and other approaches have linked concepts in diagrams. However, Buzan insists his creation is valid.
"The Mind Map is a new form of thinking," he says. "It is based on the fundamental principle of imagination and association, which is the mnemonic or memory principle - it's a new realisation of that basic law."
The approach satisfies the brain's thirst to link concepts and images in a non-linear approach, a factor that gets lost in the traditional rush to list, Buzan notes. "You see this happening in government and business with every brainstorming group. Someone is the official note recorder and people call out the ideas and they put them up [in a list]. They don't realise it but they are performing in the exact opposite way to which the brain needs to perform, and structure its thought," he says.
"When you list things, what you are doing by definition is separating them, you are disassociating them. The brain works on images, imagination and association. So the normal brainstorming method is actually like going into your brain with a pair of razor-sharp scissors between your brain cells, which is horrendous."
Our listing tradition also lies behind the scourge of writer's block, according to Buzan. "Writer's block is a completely unnatural thing to happen. It's not what a brain does," he says. "You never see children getting fantasy block. Their brains just flow and flow which is natural. The reason why most people who get writer's block do, is because they have been taught to brainstorm to think creatively in a list form." Instead, if you create a hierarchical map that links concepts, colours and images, you will use more of your brain's functions, he says.
"More of the cortical skills are being used and more of the cortex gets engaged. It's like having a giant civil service and each one of the workers is a brain cell. When you use a Mind Map, more of your workers are working. In normal, linear note-taking, most of the workers are off having a break."
Buzan's critics have questioned the way he invokes simplified scientific concepts to underpin and popularise his Mind Maps, such as linking left- and right-brain skills. But he says detractors need to look closely at the research before accusing him of peddling pseudoscience.
"My response to them would be to look more in-depth into what you are saying, then read what I am saying, and then critique it. And I will be more than thrilled to meet them and debate on any web or public forum."
Yet while experts pick over the credentials of the scientific basis, there's little doubt that the approach works for many in practice.
Meanwhile, concrete results have been stacking up on how the human brain links images and concepts together.
A 2002 study at the University of London looked at which parts of the brain lit up in people with exceptional memory, including participants in the World Memory Championships, which Buzan heads.
Funded by the Wellcome Trust and published in the high-impact journal Nature Neuroscience, the independent research found that memory-enhancing tricks that linked images and concepts lit up several regions of the brain.
"When the individuals being tested were using imagination and association, which are the fundamental Mind Mapping tools, they always did better than when they weren't," says Buzan. "And the fascinating result was that more of the brain lit up. The metaphor really is when you were using a Mind Map you were using using colour, visual rhythm, imagination, keywords, numbers, order, structure and analysis, so a whole set of cortical skills was engaged."
Another published study suggested that using Mind Maps could improve short-term recall in medical students, but there was a lack of motivation to use the technique because it was different - the common 'fear of the new'.
Today Buzan chalks up the air miles to try and boost that motivation around the world - he is flying to Japan shortly after we talk. And while his almost evangelical zeal has won him followers and critics alike, he insists that Mind Mapping can unleash a potential that in most of us lies vastly untapped. "What I am saying can be verified by measured difference in terms of memory, creativity and learning," he says.
"The average person doesn't even begin to reach 1 per cent of what they can do. People can argue about it but you can demonstrate it very quickly. It takes very little time to demonstrate it, but it's true."
For more information see buzanworld.com To download a free trial of Mind Map software, go to www.imindmap.com
Tony Buzan is giving a seminar entitled 'Age Proof Your Brain' in the National Concert Hall, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2 on Tuesday September 2nd, 2008. Tickets cost €50 (concessions €25). For further information see www.seminars.ie, and to book online go to www.nch.ie or call 01-417 0000
MIND MAPS: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE
Stuck for ideas? A Mind Map can help kick-start your creativity. Start with an image and text of a central concept, then draw branches radiating out from it. Each branch denotes a single-word idea, and can sub-branch into further, related ideas.
"Say you have got to write an article on socks - which is not particularly appealing," suggests Tony Buzan. "You would normally write the word 'socks' at the top of a lined page and sit there depressed for an hour, and the mind is blank while the brain very intelligently has a daydream about something else far more entertaining.
"In those situations you need to just put a little picture of a pair of socks in the centre of the page and you say to the brain: 'What possible information could there be in the universe about socks?'
"Immediately our brain will have a branch saying 'materials' - cotton, polyester, wool - another one with 'uses' - cover feet, protect golf clubs, making sock puppets, Christmas presents - and so on, you open that creative Niagara Falls."
Using colours and images will also help fire up the brain about socks, and Buzan advises to have the confidence to let the creative process run without too much analysis.
You can always edit, sort or remove branches later, he says.
- Claire O'Connell
