Tony Buzan

Good evening; welcome everybody!

MSO_Admin

Yes, hello and welcome!

Tony Buzan

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.