Mind Map Mastery: The Complete Guide to Learning
Genres: Business & Money
Book Preface
“I’m looking for books about using the brain.”
“Try over there,” the librarian said, gesturing toward a shelf of books, “in the medical section.”
“No,” I replied, “I’ve already gone through those titles and I’ve no desire to operate on my brain; I just want to learn how to use it.”
The librarian looked at me blankly. “I’m afraid there aren’t any books about that topic,” she said. “Only the textbooks we have here.”
I walked away feeling frustrated and astonished. In my second year at university, I was searching for new ways to cope with an increased academic workload, as my study methods simply weren’t yielding the results I was after. In fact, the more notes I took, the worse I seemed to do. While I had yet to appreciate the true limits of linear thinking, that day I realized my so-called problem in fact represented an incredible opportunity. If there were no books about how to use the brain, then here was an area with extraordinary potential for research.
Over the years that followed, I studied psychology and the general sciences, neurophysiology, neurolinguistics and semantics, information theory, memory and mnemonic techniques, perception and creative thinking. I came to understand the workings of the human brain and the conditions that allow it to perform at its best.
Ironically, my research also highlighted the flaws in my own study methods, as it gradually dawned on me that my lecture notes were word-based, monotonic and boring; if anything, their linear format offered an incredibly effective way of training myself to be stupid! Practice makes perfect: if you practise perfectly, your practice makes you perfect. However, if you practise badly, practice makes you perfectly bad. When I began to practise more and more linear, monotonic note-taking, I became more and more perfectly stupid! I urgently needed to change both my thinking and my actions.
By studying the structure of the brain, I found the breakthrough I was searching for. The fact that we possess a minimum of 100 billion brain cells, each one of which contributes to our thinking, inspired me. I found it enthralling that each of these neurons has tentacles radiating out from the cell’s centre like the branches of a tree, and I realized that I could make use of this model diagrammatically to create the ultimate thinking tool.
This proved to be a major contribution to the development of Radiant Thinking (see page 33), which in turn helped lead to the birth of the Mind Map.
At its simplest, a Mind Map is an intricate diagram that mirrors the structure of a brain cell with branches reaching out from its centre, evolving through patterns of association. However, since its inception in the mid-1960s, the Mind Map has proved to be much more than an excellent means of notetaking: it is an efficient and profoundly inspiring way to feed our starving minds, intellects and spirits. It has developed exponentially and, as you will see in this book, can be applied in many ways – from nurturing creativity and strengthening memory to helping fight dementia.
Over the years, the Mind Map has been misunderstood by some and misrepresented by others, yet my vision persists of a world in which every child and adult understands what a Mind Map is, how it works, and how it can be applied to all aspects of life.
This book aims to show you how a good Mind Map can feed you as an individual, and how the Mind Map itself continues to grow, expand and evolve in order to tackle the new challenges we all face on this planet.
And now, as we advance into the 21st century, the Mind Map can be accessed and utilized in new forms that mirror our burgeoning new technical possibilities. Mind Maps can still be hand drawn, of course, but they can also be generated by computer program, they are available online, they have been traced in the Arctic snow, they have adorned the sides of mountains and they can even be etched by drones in the sky.
Join me in this great adventure and prepare to radiate your mental power far beyond anything you have ever experienced before!
TONY BUZAN
Introduction
Why Is This Book Needed?
A Mind Map is a revolutionary thinking tool that, when mastered, will transform your life. It will help you process information, come up with new ideas, strengthen your memory, get the most out of your leisure time and improve the way you work.
I devised the Mind Map initially as an innovative form of note-taking that can be used in any situation where linear notes would normally be taken, such as attending lectures, listening to telephone calls, during business meetings, carrying out research and studying. However, it quickly became clear that Mind Maps can also be used for ground-breaking design and planning; for providing an incisive overview of a subject; for inspiring new projects; for uncovering solutions and breaking free from unproductive ways of thinking, among many other things. In this book, you will come across innumerable exciting applications for Mind Maps. They can even be used as an exercise in their own right to give your brain a workout and boost your powers of creative thinking.
In Mind Map Mastery, you will discover how Mind Mapping can help you access your own multiple intelligences and realize your true potential. The practical exercises in this book are designed to train you in this expansive way of thinking, and you will discover the true stories of other people, including master Mind Mappers and world-renowned experts and pioneers in their fields, whose lives have been radically transformed by Mind Mapping.
Your brain is a sleeping giant, and Mind Map Mastery is here to help wake it up!
A New Way of Thinking
When I introduced Mind Maps to the world in the 1960s, little did I suspect what lay ahead. In the preliminary stages of my research into human thinking, I used an early prototype of Mind Mapping to improve my studies. This was a form of note-taking in which I combined words and colours. It evolved when I started to underline the keywords in my notes and realized they made up less than 10 percent of what I had written down. Yet these keywords unlocked core concepts. Through my study of the ancient Greeks, I knew I needed to find a simple way to make connections between the keywords so that they could be easily memorized.
The ancient Greeks developed a number of elaborate memory systems that enabled them to perfectly recall hundreds and thousands of facts. These systems relied on the power of imagination and association to make connections through, for example, the method of loci. This was one of the techniques invented by the ancient Greeks to improve their memories and is also known as the Memory Journey, the Memory Palace or the Mind Palace Technique (see box, right).
I came across the method of loci during my research into human thought processes, but I had been unwittingly introduced to another mnemonic method in the very first minutes of my very first day at university. This was the Major System – a phonetic method developed by the German writer and historian Johann Just Winckelmann (1620–99). In the first lecture of my university term, a sardonic professor, built like a barrel with tufts of red hair sprouting from his head, walked into the lecture room and, hands clasped behind his back, proceeded to call out the roll of students perfectly. If somebody was absent, he called out their name, the names of their parents, and the student’s date of birth, phone number and home address. When he had finished, he looked at us with a raised eyebrow and a slight sneer. He despised his students, but he was a marvellous teacher – and I was hooked.
How to Build a Memory Palace
According to the Roman orator Cicero (106–43 BCE), the spatial memorization technique known as the method of loci (or places, from the Latin loci) was discovered by a Greek lyric poet and sophos (wise man) called Simonides of Ceos (c.556–c.468 BCE).
In his dialogue De Oratore, Cicero describes how Simonides attended a banquet to perform a poem in honour of the host. Shortly after performing the poem, he was called outside and while he was gone the roof of the banqueting hall suddenly collapsed, crushing the other guests to death. Some of their bodies were mangled beyond recognition, which was a great concern, as they needed to be identified in order to receive the proper burial rites. Simonides, however, was able to identify the dead by drawing on his visual memory of where each of the guests had been seated around the banquet table.
From this experience, Simonides realized that anyone could improve their memory by selecting locations and forming mental images of the things they wished to remember. If the images were stored in the visualized places in a particular order, it would then be possible to remember anything through the power of association. The resulting method of loci was described in a number of the rhetorical treatises of ancient Greece and Rome, and is better known to us today as the Memory Palace.
When, after that first lecture, I asked him how he’d managed to perform such an extraordinary feat of memory, he refused to tell me, simply saying, “Son, I’m a genius.” I tested him for the next three months until one day he decided to let us in on his secret, and taught us the Major System. This mnemonic technique uses a simple code that converts numbers into phonetic sounds. The sounds can then be turned into words – and the words transformed into images with which to furnish a Memory Palace.
My new method of note-taking drew upon my growing understanding of mnemonic systems and radically simplified the practice of the ancient Greeks by using colour to forge links between interrelated concepts. While it had yet to evolve into a fully fledged Mind Map, it was already markedly more effective than straightforward linear note-taking, which by comparison was monochromatic, monotone and monotonous – with the results to match. If you are making notes using only blue or black ink, the effect of the print on the page is by default boring, which means your brain will tune out, dial down and eventually go to sleep. All of which explains why “sleeping sickness” often plagues study halls, libraries and meetings!
Pleased with the success of my new method, I began to take on pupils as a hobby and coach them in my technique. Many of my pupils had been labelled as academic failures and it was rewarding to watch them quickly start to improve their grades and outperform their peers (see box, right).
The Next Steps
During the subsequent stages of my development of Mind Maps, I began to think in more detail about the hierarchy that governs our patterns of thinking, and I realized that there are
key ideas➡key key ideas➡ key key key ideas
Buzzing about “Buzan Diagrams”
Jezz Moore was a struggling college student when he attended a lecture on a new method of learning called “Buzan Diagrams”. The lecturer explained how to write down a topic in the centre of the page and fill the area around it with “keywords” and “prompts” that were strung together with connecting lines, thereby dispensing with the need to memorize elaborate lists. Jezz was stunned by how simple yet effective this method was. From being an academic underachiever, he went on to read economics and politics at university and, after post-graduate studies in corporate finance, gained a Master of Business Administration (MBA).
Some years later, he found himself at a rowing club supper. The subject of learning and education came up, and Jezz – fuelled by his passion for the technique that had transformed his studies, as well as a glass or two of wine – began to lecture the guest sitting next to him on how “being clever is easy”. Inviting his fellow guest to interrupt if he was going too fast, he explained how the technique worked and helpfully sketched a diagram on a paper napkin: “There you have it … Buzan Diagrams.” A moment lapsed before the guest said, “You do realize I am Tony Buzan?”
I was delighted to hear first-hand how my note-taking methods had helped change Jezz’s life; and Jezz and I have since become the best of friends. In the years that followed, I used Mind Mapping techniques to help Jezz coach athletes who went on to row for Great Britain and to become Olympic medallists.
In this way, I discovered the power of Radiant Thinking, which I will explain in more detail in Chapter 1 (see page 33). As my understanding grew, I gradually began to build up the architecture of the Mind Map using connections such as arrows, codes and curving lines. A pivotal meeting with the talented Australian landscape artist Lorraine Gill helped me formulate the next steps, as she challenged me to reappraise the role that pictures and colours played within the Mind Map’s structure. Her insights inspired the ways in which imagery is used in Mind Maps today.
When I compared my evolving techniques with notes made by historical figures such as the Renaissance artists Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo (1475–1564), and scientists such as Madame Curie (1867–1934) and Einstein (1879–1955), I found some interesting parallels in the ways in which they used pictures, codes and interconnecting lines: their words and diagrams explode in all directions across the page, free to roam in whichever direction their thoughts happen to take, rather than remaining glued to a straight horizontal line. (See also “A Short History of the Thinking Behind Mind Maps”, page 42.) However, the real-life experiences of my growing number of students, clients and colleagues suggested that the techniques I was developing were so accessible, they could help people from all walks of life: you didn’t have to be a world-class genius making ground-breaking discoveries to benefit from them.
Mind Maps are analytical in the sense that you can use them to solve any problem. Through the use of associated logic, Mind Maps delve right to the heart of the matter. They also allow you to see the bigger picture. They are on the one hand microcosmic and on the other macrocosmic.
Keeping It Natural
I described in the Preface how, during the course of my research, I was struck by the shape of a brain cell itself: notes jotted down in diagram form often seemed, albeit unwittingly, to mimic the organic structure of a neuron, with connecting branches reaching from a nucleus.
While I was mulling this over, I would go for long walks in nature, where my thoughts and imagination felt much freer to wander. It dawned on me that as we humans are part of nature, our thinking and note-taking ought to reflect nature too in some way: we should reflect the laws of nature in all our human functioning, especially when it comes to putting outside the brain what is found within it.
I gradually developed my techniques into a thinking tool that could be applied to a whole range of human daily activities, and that would mirror the creativity and radiance of our thought processes. The result was the first true Mind Map.
Contents
Foreword by Dominic O’Brien
Preface
Introduction: Why Is This Book Needed?
1. What Is a Mind Map?
2. How to Mind Map
3. What Is Not a Mind Map?
4. Solution Finding
5. The Infinite Applications of Mind Maps
6. The Future of Mind Mapping
Resources
Acknowledgements
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