TONY BUZAN COMES TO TOWN (Think Ingeniously – Enhance Creativity – Boost Productivity)

TONY BUZAN COMES TO TOWN

Think Ingeniously – Enhance Creativity – Boost Productivity

By Adil Ahmad, 

Editor, Octara 

www.octara.com 

PULL QUOTE: “Having struggled through my student days, I was determined that everyone should have the benefit of this liberating thinking tool” – Tony Buzan

In measured manner the father of Mind Maps put forth his treasured thoughts that have brought about a global revolution in the way the human brain can be optimized for knowledge retention. Over 200 high powered delegates registered for this one-of-a-kind seminar, representing a cross section of Pakistani trade, commerce and industry. Most were familiar with the content on offer. Mind Mapping has been around for the last four decades. But the occasion was unique for it offered the privilege and pleasure of hearing it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

Octara’s latest offering, Tony Buzan, is an international celebrity and the world’s leading author on the brain and learning, who has authored and co-authored over 100 books. Mind Mapping® is all about optimizing the comprehension and retention of information and knowledge, uploaded into the brain through the use of key words and colorful imagery. Mind Mapping® has been called the Swiss Army Knife for the Brain. It is now used by major corporations world-wide to improve thinking, innovation and productivity.

This was Tony’s first trip to Pakistan, a long overdue trip he says. He has traveled to 75 countries around the world, and Pakistan is the latest addition at number 76. As an Englishman he had met many people from Pakistan in England, but somehow his visit failed to materialize. Travel advisories from his government to the contrary, this time Tony decided to see for himself what this enigma called Pakistan was all about.

Tony’s audience was alive and radiant throughout the day as it imbibed with relish Tony’s illuminating discourse, peppered as it was with entertaining and informative examples from his vast store of experience. A day earlier Tony had been given the nickel tour of Karachi by Octara CEO Jamil Janjua, and it included the Karachi Literature Festival, whose caliber impressed him immensely.

Best Restaurant in the World!

The nickel tour also included dinner at the Bar-b-que Tonite restaurant that seems to have floored Tony completely, but in a good way! “It is the best restaurant around the world that I have ever been to in my entire life,” he said. “The food was phenomenal, and the smell captivating. The place was full with families and children, and I felt totally secure. I was very happy, and I ate, and I ate, and I ate some more, course after course after course! It was some of the most delicious food that I have ever had.” High order praise indeed which Sardar Rahim and his high performance crew at Bar-b-que Tonite can justifiably feel proud of.

Brain’s potential is phenomenal

Map out your thoughts, says Tony. “The memory system is based upon imagination and association, and was practiced by ancient Greeks many centuries ago. I realized that one-colour monotonous note-taking was creating a gigantic logjam in the individual and collective global brain that needed a new note-taking and thinking tool to unblock it.”

Information overload is an illness of the Information Age and causes stress, he says, talking about ‘death by power-point’! Knowledge management requires managing the mind. “We use less than one percent of our brains. The brain’s potential is phenomenal.” Tony’s been a winner of the World Memory Championship. Recently a 45 years old man memorized 202 digits to win it, and remembered those digits ten hours later, repeating them backwards! And this man, said Tony, had been called stupid in school!

The memory is an infinite database, and Tony’s objective is to help other people help themselves. In school the teaching of memory is the opposite of how memory works. “Leonardo Da Vinci said that in some way everything connects with everything else. Children are interested in everything. They’re the fastest learners and the most creative. Babies are a beautiful example of scientists given their curiosity and eagerness to experiment.”

I finally got to sit down with the man himself for an interview after the day’s proceedings had come to an end, amidst some apprehension that he might be too tired to engage with me. But Tony was fresh as ever. When passion and purpose intersect, they make for an inexhaustible store of joyful energy. Everything about him was available in the public domain, a fact that he alluded to gently, but humored me nonetheless, and took me down memory lane to how it all began.

Wither Brain Manual?

As a young child, said Tony, he had loved the idea of taking notes and of learning. But by the time he was a teenager his thinking was already getting into a mess, and he began to hate anything to do with study, especially note-taking. He noticed the extraordinary paradox that the more notes he took the worse his studies and memory became. He went to the librarian looking for a book that would help him memorize better, and was directed to the medical section! While there was a manual on how to use all manner of gadgetry, there was no manual available on how to use the brain.

In an effort to improve matters Tony began to underline key words and ideas in red, and to put important things in boxes. Magically, he says, his memory began to improve. While in school at age 7 Tony experienced a situation that caused him quite forcefully to question the validity of the teaching system. His best friend loved Nature, as also did he, but his best friend was by and far more knowledgeable than he was, Tony felt. His friend could walk out into the woods and identify by flight pattern different butterflies and birds. But back in school he was called dumb and a dullard. One day there was a test on Nature, and Tony topped the class while his best friend bottomed out.

Questioning the System

“I knew that he knew more than I knew, and I was supposed to be #1. But I knew I wasn’t #1. He should have been #1. I was 7 years old at the time and it got me angry and motivated. It made me ask the question what is ‘smart’? What does ‘intelligent’ mean? Who has the right to say that a child is unintelligent? So I investigated.”

Tony says that while taking notes he had been taught to use one colour and write in lines, which he found boring and rigid, and so his grades fell. It led him to explore how his brain really worked. That led him to the use of colours that helped him remember better, and to the use of keywords that connected the ideas together.

“So, I got better and better, and my grades improved and time spent studying grew less and less. I was trying to rescue myself by using a learning tool, a note-taking method that was clearly helping me. I used to say to my friends ‘hey! Look at this! Try this!’ and they would try it and say ‘it really works! From near failing marks I am now getting Bs and As!’”

Working with ‘delinquents’

Clearly Tony was onto something, and before long he had started teaching in school. “I was working with delinquent, wild and poor children, and I was told that they weren’t very bright and wouldn’t go to university. That did not make sense to me. Learning to speak is more difficult than playing the piano concerto! It is a phenomenally complex thing that the brain can do.”

When children begin to mind map they discover they are more intelligent than they were told they were, says Tony. “They realize they’re more creative, and learn how their brain works. They realize that if they got hit on their head then they would get concussion and bruise and damage their brain cells. Now they do not wish to damage their bio-computer, and do not want to fight anymore.”

Tony says that just because the kids speak with a ‘funny’ accent they shouldn’t be stereotyped as dimwits. “When people speak with an accent they are speaking perfectly in the way people in their area speak. They make brilliant students. When I taught these kids I asked them what their daydreams were, and helped them mind map. Their mental clarity improved tremendously. When they mind mapped their subjects they went from the bottom of the class to the top, to first class.”

Bomber Planes & Doodle Bugs

Tony Buzan was born in London on the 2^nd of June 1942, and notwithstanding his teenage academic crisis which the inventor in him successfully overcame, he went on to become Head Prefect of his school. He remembers the Second World War when at the age of 2 years his little bedroom was in an area under the staircase, considered the safest place in the house during air raids. He remembers the bomber planes and Doodle Bugs that made a whistling sound as they approached the ground before detonation.

Tony finished secondary school and went to university on a scholarship to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. There he told them that he wanted to study everything! And was politely told that that would not be possible! Tony says that he found everything interesting, in particular History which he saw as the memory of the nation and tribe, and indeed the human race. He became interested in History as a hobby. Four years at the UBC and Tony joined Simon Fraser University where he became charter student president, and studied and taught Psychology, English Literature, Mathematics and Statistics, a most unusual combination of subjects.

BBC lends a hand

He did not have a branding business plan, says Tony. “I realized in the late 1960s that every student needed to know mind maps, so I taught at schools and universities, and did radio interviews.” In 1973 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) found out what he was doing, and asked him if he would do a half hour program on the brain and note taking techniques.

“I went to a meeting with the head of education at BBC Television. He said they wanted something on brain cells, memory, problems with memory, how to use the memory system, reading, reading faster, concentration, note taking and mind map. I told him we would need to do 10 programs! He said ‘Jolly Good! Ten programs it is!’ Each branch of the brainstorming session’s mind map generated a half hour program in a ten part series. He then asked if I could write a book on that as well, and I said yes. He said ‘Jolly good! Ten programs and a Book!’ and we shook hands. This was in 1974. These 10 programs went on air 3 times a year on BBC from 1974 until 1989. People were calling me from around the world asking if I would give a lecture, or teach their children, or work with the government, or work with Fortune 500 companies. So I have traveled around the world from 1974 to 2013, and the end of the road is so far in the distance.”                  

Shoveling manure!

Tony’s first job after graduation was working on a farm as a laborer, shoveling chicken manure. His other job options had been selling insurance and mortgage funds, but neither of those he felt needed a graduate degree to do. The farm job attracted him since he loved animals and Nature. He asked the lady at the employment agency how much the farm job paid, and says she got very angry, accusing him and other students of being interested only in the money. “I told her I have 20 years of education on my CV, and I want to know why the Universe is offering me a job shoveling manure! I worked at it the entire summer, and it was one of my favorite jobs. It was wonderful exercise in the outdoors and fresh air. I loaded the lorry up with manure, drove it into the woods, and emptied it so the trees had the fertilizer.”

Also, while doing physical work Tony says he could think. “Doing paperwork in a bank one cant think. Out there in Nature, using my body, I could really think.” Tony has been partial to rowing on the sporting front, in particular sculling, which he calls motion yoga. Living near Marlow-on-Thames, he is inspired by Sir Steven Geoffery Redgrave, arguably the world’s greatest rower with 5 Olympic gold medals (1984 to 2000), and who’s been world number one for 25 years. Asked how he did it, Redgrave said rowing is all about the brain, and the way the athlete thinks and envisions the goal. He said he trained his brain on how to think and synergize the brain and body.

Tony is also fascinated by swimming, even though earlier on he had been scared of it. He taught himself how to control his breath while underwater, and learnt the freestyle crawl and backstroke.

Fathering ‘thought gene’ children

Tony Buzan never married. Had he married, he says, he would have liked to have fathered 20 children, each a specialist in a different field like music, athletics, poetry, science, and so on. Instead, Tony has focused on global mental literacy, and fathered millions of children with his thought gene rather than the physical gene. “Hundreds of millions of mind maps have been done by children, and I think of them as my children,” says Tony.

Since 1974 and the launch of the ‘Use Your Head’ ten-part television series on BBC, he has devoted his time to lecturing and teaching about the theory and application of Mind Maps, says Tony. “Having struggled through my student days, I was determined that everyone should have the benefit of this liberating thinking tool.” Thank you Tony Buzan.