Welcome to the end of this
year, decade, century and millennial discussion on the human brain.
Welcome in advance to the new century and the new millennium, which have
been declared by the Brain Trust charity to be the Century of the Brain
and the Millennium of the Mind. I am ready to take questions and looking
forward to what you have to say!
MSO_Admin
Welcome one and all and
especially Tony Buzan! We would like to thank Mr. Buzan for taking this
time to chat with us.
Book
What has been the most
useful mind techinque for you and why?
Tony Buzan
Let me answer that
question by giving a little history of my own mental skills development.
When I was 13, I was given a speed reading test and scored 213 words per
minute which was second in my class. The top student, a girl, scored
over 300. I immediately, of course, asked my teacher how I could improve
my own reading speed and was told that I could not. As I had already
been able to improve my muscular strength and physical speed it seemed
to me absurd that I was being informed that I could not improve a
physical/mental skill such as speed reading.
I immediately began
training my eyes and brain to accelerate the rate at which I absorbed
written information and within a fairly short period of time was able to
read at over 400 words per minute with good comprehension. This was my
first realisation that my brain was indeed somewhat like a muscle, and
that its strength could be increased. Speed reading showed me the way
and must therefore be considered as one of my most important mental
developments.
It enabled me to get
through all my school and university studies at over twice the rate that
I would have taken previously. In addition, during my first year at
university, a kindly professor introduced me to the tantalising and
fascinating world of mnemonics - the memory systems developed by the
Greeks at the height of their renaissance. In literally one day, I was
able to magnify the power of my short- , medium- and long-term recall by
a factor of ten. I was staggered and immediately began to try this new
mental skill for the memorisation of all my studies enabling me to
maintain my marks in a fraction of the time. I was thus able to spend a
lot more time on athletic, social, mind sport and other pursuits.
Over the years, my
fascination with mnemonics led me to the development of my third major
mental tool, the Mind Map. This tool, initially invented as a
multi-dimensional memory technique, I soon discovered with the help of
my brother, Professor Barry Buzan, was like a Swiss Army Knife for the
brain and could be applied to literally any area of mental activity,
including memory, creative thinking, planning, decision-making,
communication, and writing etc. Indeed, the Mind Map Book written with
my brother was entirely planned by Mind Maps. In summary, then, the main
three tools are speed reading, memory systems and the Mind Map.
Book
Thank you for an
excellent answer.
Tony Buzan
Thank you!
Janus
How does the Mind
Mapping at MSO work?
Tony Buzan
In the Mind Mapping
competition at MSO, and you are encouraged to enter the next event in
August 2000, the participants are given different tasks, that they are
asked to Mind Map. In one test, they are provided with a magazine and
are asked to Mind Map their summary of the entire periodical. They are
given adequate time for this, to both read and Mind Map, although speed
reading does help! In another test, they are given a 15-minute to
30-minute lecture, which they Mind Map "live".
In the third task, they
are asked to choose their own topic and to produce a particularly
original mind map. The mind map judging panel marks on the basis of
clarity, adherence to mind mappping principles, originality, creativity,
depth of thought, and the global aesthetic value of the Mind Map. I look
forward to seeing Janus's Mind Maps! For further information on Mind
Mapping, contact the Buzan Centres at +44 1202 674676 or +44 1202
674776, or by e-mail to buzan@mind-map.com.
Book
Have you ever noticed
negative affects in using these techniques?
Tony Buzan
No. Let me just expand on
that a bit; people often assume that if you read fast you lose
comprehension. The opposite is true. The faster you are able to take in
material in meaningful groups of words, the better your understanding,
comprehension and concentration become. Again, people often think that
using memory systems somehow disconnects the information in your memory
banks and also endangers you of "filling up your brain". Both
of these are complete misconceptions. The memory systems actually help
you organise, structure and network the information in your brain.
The capacity of your brain
is so gigantic that if you were to fill it with a thousand pieces of
information every second it would not be nearly full after a thousand
years. Mind Mapping involves the use of both the left and the right
cortex and all the major memory principles. It has no disadvantages and
only enhances the way in which the brain can think or feel.
MSO_Admin
If there are no other
questions I would like to ask one. Professor Steve Jones, leading
geneticist at the University College of London has suggested in the
Sunday Times today that human physical evolution has come to an end.
Other genetic scientists believe that our brains will go on evolving
even if our bodies do not. What is your view on this?
Tony Buzan
My view is that evolution
will continue to evolve! If one takes the current scientific view of the
history of evolution and intelligence, a fascinating numerical pattern
becomes apparent.
The life of the universe
is estimated to be 12 billion (12,000,000,000) years. Our planet is
5,000,000,000 years old. Life evolved an incredibly short time after the
formation of the planet - 4,500,000,000 years ago; astoundingly, homo
sapiens appeared only 3,000,000 years ago. The modern brain, the one
with which you are engaged in this conversation, is a mere 50,000 years
old - you have the latest model! Civilization (if you believe
civilization has ever existed!) has existed for only 10,000 years. 90%
of the information ever discovered about the internal workings of the
human brain has been discovered in the last 10 years!
That information we know
comprises less than 10% of what there is to be known. In addition to
this, there is also the fact that in the 1950s, it was estimated that we
use only 50% of our brain's capacity. By the 1960s, it had been reduced
to 40%; by the 1970s, to 30%; by the 1980s, to between 10% and 20% and
in the 1990s, to less than 1%! This looks like a very depressing
statistic when in fact it is the opposite; it shows that although our
"use" has been constant, our awareness of the potential has
grown to gigantic proportions. We realise that the equipment between our
ears is many, many, many times greater than we had previously thought.
Coincidentally, we are
aware at the turn of the century and millennium that an evolutionary
turning-point in the development of intelligence. The instrument (the
brain) which for tens of thousands of years had focused on the external
environment by splitting the atom, learning to fly, building the world's
great edifices, inventing the engine, medicine, the sciences and the
arts and exploring to the ends of the universe with both vehicles and
eyes that can see 15,000,000,000 light years has suddenly began to focus
attention upon itself. The consequences will be inevitably dramatic and
amazing and will dwarf anything that the human race has accomplished so
far.
We are literally at the
beginning of the dawn of intelligence and the evolution of that
intelligence will accelerate at a rate far greater than it has ever done
before. Taking the inverse pyramid of the previous numbers, the funnel
of the final second of this century and millennium will lead us through
a great "wormhole" of evolution into an explosive new
renaissance; by the size of which, the flames of the Greek and Italian
renaissances will look like the flames of a candle compared to the
plasma loops of our own sun.
That is why the Brain
Trust charity has declared the next century to be the Century of the
Brain and the next millennium to be the Millennium of the Mind. Because
of this, from midnight on New Century and Millennium Day, we will be
welcoming around the world all those who wish to launch with us this
major new initiative in the development of and promulgation of
information about intelligence. Come and join us!
Book
I'm interested in
learning new languages, like Esperanto. What techniques are most useful
for that?
Tony Buzan
I'm delighted you asked
that question, as the learning of new languages has become a recent
passion of mine; in the New Year, I shall be applying all my knowledge
of the brain and its workings to the acquisition of Spanish. Current
feeling is that once a person is over forty years old, that person's
language-learning days are over! It is also generally held that a
three-year-old infant can learn a new language at a much more rapid rate
than any adult. I'm going to attempt to disprove all this!
My recommended approach,
and do please follow me on this web site in the coming year as I conduct
this experiment on myself, is the following:
1) Realise that all
languages in their spoken form involve people in the use of only between
1,000 to 2,000 words. This is far less than the tens of thousands of
words people *think* they have to learn.
2) In view of the above,
apply memory systems to the acquisition of this new vocabulary and the
task already begins to seem surprisingly easy and simple.
3) Mind Map all new
vocabulary words combining these with the images appropriate to them. In
this way, you will be linking this language to itself and to its images
rather than using the more cumbersome method of linking every foreign
word to a word in your own language and then having to translate them
into their own semantic and language form.
4) Learn the accent! Most
people are afraid to make fools of themself. This is a dangerous
impediment to good language learning! When learning a new language, whatever
language it is, study the accent and in your own learning accentuate it
as a mimic would. This will allow you to become deeply sonically
familiar with the music of the new language.
5) Read books in the
language. Do not immediately try to read encyclopaedic tomes; buy
very young children's books in the new language. These books will
contain the basic key words you need and will be liberally sprinkled
with images which will again enhance your learning ability. A picture
really is worth a thousand words in these instances!
6) I've hinted at before;
feel free to make mistakes. Mistakes are fun, natural and a wonderful
way to learn anything.
7) Find good teachers in
the language and make sure you study with them in a serious and
playful way. Very often the best teachers are children under the age of
10!
8) If possible, go to the
country where the language is spoken and totally absorb yourself both in
the language itself and in all aspects of the culture.
9) Study the way in which
a baby learns language. Babies are by far the best language learners on
the planet, not because they have better brains than us but because they
have not been taught to use their brains in ways that are
counter-productive. We have! Therefore, mimic everything you see babies
doing in learning languages including happily making mistakes observing
intently with all their senses the language figures around them
and persisting in the way that great geniuses do.
Book, keep me posted of
your own progress and any useful techniques that you develop while
pursuing Esperanto or any other language; I will similarly keep you
posted of my own Pilgrim's Progress! It is my firm belief that with
appropriate techniques applied to the process of learning any language a
new language can be acquired comfortably within three months. Let the
games begin!
Book
Thank you for an
excellent answer again! I have followed many of the pieces of advice in
my studies. But how to choose the 1000 words? You already touched that a
bit, with children books.
Tony Buzan
In any language, the one
thousand words that I mentioned will make up nearly 100% of any standard
conversation. Amazingly, the first 100 of that 1000 make up 50% of all
conversation. The basic question-words and fundamental pronouns are
obviously included. In my book, "Master Your Memory", I give
you the first 100. (Those which make up 50% of conversation.) The
remaining 900 you can fairly easily make up yourself by scanning common
nouns such as house, hat and sky etc., by including primary scientific
information, such as the colours of the rainbow, by getting down such
basics as numbers, days of the week and months of the year and by
including the major foods that are important to you.
Another additional and
delightful piece of information is the fact that many European languages
one could easily argue, are in fact not different languages at all but
pretty much the same language spoken with a different accent. For
example, in English, French, Spanish and German, well over 200 of the
basic 1,000 words are virtually identical and simply pronounced
differently. One easy example of this is the word "excellent";
all the modern computer and electronic vocabularies which are global and
are incorporated into the language with the particular accent of that
particular language.
In fact, I am getting so
encouraged by my own answers that I think I may have to reduce that
period of learning a new language from three months to two!
Book
Thanks for the
encouragment! We are emphasizing the human brain here. What value has a
computer in enhancing the learning process?
Tony Buzan
Consider the computer to
be like a loved pet. In comparison to the human brain, the following
comparison can be made: if we take the world's most powerful computer
and say, for the purposes of the metaphor, that its power is represented
by a normal house, what size building would we need to construct in
order to compare the capacity of that most powerful computer to the
capacity of the human brain? Would it be a doll's house? A single room?
A house the same size as the computer house, or something bigger? In
fact, it would be a skyscraper ten blocks square at the base and
reaching to the moon!
So when learning a new
language, primarily use your own super bio-computer and its massive
powers to take in information, store it, retrieve it, use it and create
from it. Use the computer and the Web to research and store data about
the language itself and about the culture from which that language
emerges. Also use the computer as a testing agent, much like a good
coach. You can devise your own memory and other games to your own
satisfaction.
MSO_Admin
A bit of a technical
glitch there. Are we all back and functioning?
Book
You have coached the
British Chess Team. How have people who have used their 'own' tehcniques
to reach Grand Master level been able to benefit from new techniques,
and how have they accepted them?
Tony Buzan
The popular conception of
mind sports, especially chess, is that they are entirely left-brained
pursuits involving the use of logic, linear thinking, logical thinking
and numerical analysis. Indeed, this belief is so pervasive that when
Raymond Keene was in school and was already manifesting a prodigious
chess talent that he would necessarily be top of the class in
mathematics and physics and not so skilled in the other subjects. In
fact, exactly the opposite was true - Ray being top in all other
subjects and not, at that stage of his life, particularly inspired by
mathematics and physics.
The truth, of course, is
that chess and all other mind sports are "whole-brain"
activities involving, as they must, logic and numerical and calculative
thinking and also the "right-brain activities" of imagination,
rhythm, colour and spatial awareness etc. In addition to these necessary
skills, it is also important for the mind sports player to realise that
as his or her brain gets older it will get better if it is trained
appropriately and only worse if it is trained inappropriately. Another
brain principle I emphasise when coaching chess players is that of
persistence and the ability to learn from mistakes. All great champions
exhibited phenomenal "stickability" and always moved on from
lost or ruined games.
Yet another point to
emphasise is that the Mind Sports Olympiad motto "mens sana in
corpore sano" - a healthy mind in a healthy body, or a healthy body
in a healthy mind. Garry Kasparov, the World Chess Champion, realised
this early in his career and as a result, when preparing for a World
Championship match, devotes nearly as much attention to his physical
health as to his mental preparation. The six-times World Memory
Champion, Dominic O'Brien, trains physically for two hours a day before
any major memory championship.
Ron King, the world
draughts champion, is a superb athlete and runs ultra-marathons plays
marathon tennis and table-tennis matches and deep-sea dives, all for the
purpose of honing his mental sharpness. He claims that it is his supreme
physical fitness that is a primary cause of his dominance in the field.
The reason why physical fitness helps so much in mental sport is that it
produces one pint more of blood in the body and that each pint of blood
carries a far greater volume of oxygen to the brain than does unfit
blood. All the mental athletes I have coached found that the points I
have mentioned in this answer have been of great benefit to them.
Expanding your question a
little, the same has been true in reverse; the physcial athletes I have
trained have found that mental training, including mind sports, helps in
their physical performance. It is interesting that tonight Lennox Lewis
easily won the BBC Sportsman of the Year award. Lennox is renowned for
his playing of chess as a method for helping him strengthen his
strategic thinking capabilities for his next championship bout. He
credits chess for enabling him to be a far better thinker than other
boxers and in the ring to literally outthink them in the heat of combat.
MArkL
How do you explain
idiot savants - and is Marilyn vos Savant one of them! :-)
Tony Buzan
A clever question! Idiot
savants are those people who have one extraordinary ability with an
apparent lack of ability in other areas. Two of the most common examples
of this are in specific memory and in calculation. One of the most
famous neo-idiot savants was the Russian Shereshevsky, known as
"S", who was able to remember literally anything that he had
seen or heard, but was not considered a success in other areas.
From my own study of this
area, I would suggest that psychology has often misunderstood the idiot
savant and because of their extraordinary capacity in the known area has
tended to let their amazement at this specific "shining star"
blind them to other skills that the idiot savant actually has.
Shereshevsky, for example, was actually able to use the phenomenal
powers that drove his memory to solve very complex essential problems
simply by visualising them. He was also an extremely interesting
conversationalist and visionary.
Vos Savant is not an idiot
savant! She simply has an unfortunate name in the context of her own
particular skill, which is IQ. Marilyn took an IQ test at a very early
age, where distortion of the scores is much more common, and emerged
with an IQ of over 200 one of the highest ever recorded. She is now a
journalist and agony aunt in American newspapers and is, in addition to
all this, an attractive individual with a witty and charming
personality.
Book
Was he the same
Shereshevsky who wrote chess endgame books?
Tony Buzan
No. I didn't know there
was a Shereshevsky who wrote chess endgame books and wonder whether Book
is referring to Reshevsky? Let me know, Book!
Book
M.I. Sheresevsky.
Tony Buzan
Just to check on that,
Reshevsky was the American chess champion.
Book
He is not the same as
S. Reshevsky.
Tony Buzan
I do not know that author
and will refer the question to Grandmaster Raymond Keene, who definitely
will know. Perhaps they are related!
Book
How much have idiot
savants been useful in developing mental mapping and other similar
theories?
Tony Buzan
Idiot savants have helped
enormously in our understanding of the potential of the human brain and
they have shown that in certain areas such as memory the brain has a
vast, approaching infinite, potential. The work that Professor Alexander
Luria did with Shereshevsky was part of the background work that helped
me realise the potency of mnemonic and memory techniques and the
incredible significance of imagination and association in all learning,
thinking, memory and creative skills.
It was imagination and
association that formed the basic foundation stones of Mind Mapping
theory. The Mind Map can be seen, from one perspective, to be an
associative network of multi-sensory images including words. It is my
recommendation that everyone in the room studies all "brain
stories" as there are an increasing number reported in the popular
press these days - that is, well over 10,000,000 so far this year (!) -
and each one of them tends to contain at least one gem that can be
applied to the brain of the individual who is reading the story.
MSO_Admin
I believe before the
server crashed I started to ask if either aging or alcohol killed brain
cells?
Tony Buzan
The popular assumption is
that both do! The average estimate of the number of brain cells lost per
day is between 10,000 and 1,000,000 and the number lost per intake of
alcoholic beverage similarly 10,000 to 1,000,000. I have three pieces of
good news for you!
First, the scientific
community is increasingly reporting evidence to the effect that
continuing mental activity - in other words, an active mental life -
especially mental activity which includes mind sports, produces an aging
brain that both retains all its brain cells and increases the
interconnectivity between those cells.
Second, it now appears
that individual brain cells when alcohol is deluging the brain, act very
much like attacked octopuses and "draw in". In the cases of
severely alcoholic individuals who have been brain scanned with
"small brains" at the height of their addiction, later scans,
after rehabilitation, show their brains back to normal size. It appears
therefore that even in severe cases the brain survives. Normal intake of
alcohol apparently kills no brain cells. It just feels the
morning after as if you've lost a few hundred million!
Third, and this is
revolutionary news, recent research has confirmed the destruction of
another global misconception, that the human brain cannot generate new
brain cells. The new evidence suggests not only that it can but that it
does and does so every day of your life. Floreant dentriti! (May your
brain cells flourish!)
Book
What is your favourite
pastime?
Tony Buzan
Many! Mind sports are,
obviously, one of my favourites. I am particularly passionate about
chess, Go and the newly-discovered Arabian game of Dama / Sheikh. I also
enjoy puzzles and any of the mental skills games such as memory,
creative thinking, IQ, speed reading and of course mind mapping. In the
physical field, my "sport hobbies" include competitive
sculling/rowing, the Japanese martial arts of karate and aikido,
long-distance ocean swimming, running/walking, general gymnasium
workouts and dancing.
My cultural interests
include theatre, music, art, and reading. In this field I am
particularly involved in my own personal writing, both of fiction and
poetry, and am in the early stages of my musical composing career! One
of my favourite of all activities is being with my close friends.
Brain-to-brain communication, to me, is ecstasy!
Book
Well that's impressive!
Do you think that it is important to let the brains take a rest like in
the physical athlete's world to reach for better results?
Tony Buzan
Absolutely! Although the
brain has an infinite capacity to learn, remember and create it is, in
the final equation, a physical organ. Astoundingly, even when it is at
rest, it is working in "another gear". Even when you are in
deep sleep, your brain is a minimum 80% fully active. To approach this
question from another angle, consider, Book, where you are when you come
up with those wonderful bursts of creative ideas and retrieved memories.
Most people report that they are in the bath, in the shower, on the loo,
in bed, long-distance driving, long-distance ski-ing, running or
swimming, or wandering around in nature.
If you examine what all
those situations have in common, you will realise that in each case the
individual is in some way alone and relaxed - as top athletes put it,
"in the zone". It is during rest that the brain slips into
another "lower" and gigantic gear, often working out with ease
the answers to questions that the normally-conscious brain was unable to
fathom. One comes up with the interesting conclusion that when
"you" are resting, your brain is actually working harder!
And speaking of rest, it
is probably time for many of us to slip into the world of dreams -
another realm where the brain works with amazing skill and vibrancy,
producing masterpieces which, if they could immediately be translated to
the screen, would out-Oscar Spielberg, Kubrick, Kurasawa, Hitchcock and
all! Thank you all for a delightful chat and may I wish you in momentary
conclusion a most wonderful Century of the Brain and a Millennium of the
Mind. Floreant Dentriti! Tony Buzan.
MSO_Admin
Thank you all for your
questions, your patience, and your time. Special thanks to Mr. Tony
Buzan for your answers and your time. A very interesting and encouraging
time. Don't forget to check back for future chats.
Tony Buzan
Thank you! I will be back
in the early part of next year!
MSO_Admin
You are more than
welcome any time. With that I must say thanks again to all of you. This
chat is pretty much done. Good bye all.
