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About Tony Buzan
“Tony
Buzan will do for the brain what Stephen Hawking did for the Universe.”
The Times
Known as the Mind Magician, Tony Buzan is the world’s leading author on the brain
and learning. He has authored 82 books that have been successful in more than
100 countries and 30 languages and he lectures all over the world. He has
worked out that his global lecture circuit has clocked him over two million
miles which is four times to the moon and back!
As an adviser, he has worked with multi-national companies, governments and
leading businesses and as a coach to international Olympic athletes, including
5 Olympic Gold winner, rower Sir Steven Redgrave. He has also co-founded an
Olympics for the Brain – the Mind Sports Olympiad that has attracted 25,000
entrants from 74 countries worldwide. He has given one-on-one advice to top
businessmen and lectured to thousands of children in a football stadium. Many
schools are adopting his teaching methods.
He has known throughout the world for his trademarked technique of Mind Mapping
that he calls “The
Swiss Army Knife of the Brain” which is believed to be used by over 250 million people
worldwide.
“Tony
didn’t invent the brain - he did invent the instructions!” John Husbands, MD, Institute of
Management
“More than a few serious minds out there are paying
attention.” International Herald
Tribune
In Search of Genius - An Inspiring BBC documentary featuring Tony Buzan
Increasing self-esteem and student engagement in
learning is a top priority for all educators and leaders. We have
just finished watching an extraordinary independent BBC documentary titled
"In Search of Genius" which gives insight into how we can address this
issue. Tony Buzan took part in the documentary with the aim of teaching a group
of students how to learn and motivate themselves. The following extract best
summarises this remarkable experiment:-
Buzan was given the chance to work with six 'below
average' students in Slough's [UK] hitherto failing Beechwood School. These
children had limited verbal skills, behavioural difficulties and short-term
memory problems. They were born, as someone once said, to fail.
All Buzan asked was six months to work with them in
order to prove that at least one had unrecognised potential. First, the pupils
were tested by a pair of educational psychologists, who demonstrated that some
couldn't even recite three numbers in reverse order, then Buzan tutored them
for a mere seven days during the course of the experiment, training teachers to
carry on in his absence.
On the face of it, he did nothing extraordinary. In
fact, much of it was simplicity itself. Only "Mind Mapping" -
visualising concepts with the aid of drawings - seemed an unusual strategy. It
was not half as unusual as the results.
When the psychologists returned they reported a 70%
improvement in cognitive ability, "a powerful and impressive
finding". The group had made five times the usual rate of progress in verbal
skills. Then there was Sheridan.
He had been a morose, inarticulate boy. Now he made
you want to cheer. He was a glutton for learning, so eager that one
psychologist said it was 'very, very difficult to believe it was the same
child". She was gracious enough to admit, indeed, that she would not have
believed Sheridan's progress if she had not seen it for herself.
… By Ian Bell, The Herald, 6 May,
2004
Universe of Learning Tools in Each Brain
Imagine the sun. Feel the heat. Next to the sun is a little thermometer. It is measuring the sun, as it gets hotter. The Mercury is rising. The thermometer explodes, and little balls of mercury fall on the ground.
Standing next to them is a gorgeous little goddess. She is Venus, with v-shaped cleavage, She picks up a little bit of mercury and throws it. Gravity pulls it back to Earth, and it lands in front of where you live, making a crater.
Your next door neighbour is an angry, war-like little man, who is eating a Mars bar. He is furious about all the earth in his garden. Just in time, striding down the street, 100ft tall, with a J of hair on his forehead, is the king of the gods, Jupiter. You look up at Jupiter and on his massive chest, in a big white T-shirt, in enormous capital letters, is the word SUN (standing for Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) – and sitting on Jupiter’s head is a tiny Walt Disney dog: Pluto.
And now you will never forget the order and relative sizes of the planets. Go through that story four more times and it will be indelible.
What you, along with several hundred. Kent teachers who attended an effective learning seminar led by mind-map guru Tony Buzan, have experienced is a powerful way to make information stick. Workshop of Years 3 and 4 children learned the planets through this visual mnemonic, too. The children predicted that they might be able to learn about 20 facts in two hours, but they knew 105 new things by the end of the session.
Led by Julie and Rebecca from the accelerated learning group positively MAD (Making A Difference), which runs learning days in schools and helps teachers to develop their own ideas, the group of eight and nine-year-olds learned about Marco Polo’s life through a mind map, struggled to read the names of colours written in the wrong colours, and memorised a shopping list based on eccentric imagery.
In schools, Positively MAD helps teachers make these ideas concrete, with direct curriculum applications.
“There’s a big gap between ideas and practice,” says director
Alan Winter . Julie says learning tricks help children take in facts and raise
self-esteem. One numeracy trick she uses is called 007 (the name’s Bond, Number
Bond), in which pairs adding up to 10 make a face.
Teachers can use mind maps to plan lesson units, which children can add to. The
map can then stay on the classroom wall as a visual tool. Drawing helps many
children to write, and Tony Buzan cites examples of how they generate ideas as
they lead people to make links.
A recent programme on Meridian TV conducted an experiment where, under exam
conditions, children from Sir William Borlase school in Marlow,
Buckinghamshire, planning in the old-fashioned linear way, came up with 30
ideas, while the mind-mapping students produced 99 ideas. Thirty-five thousand
requests for information flooded into the Buzan centres (www.iMindMap.com), he
says. Meanwhile, a spot on BBC1’s Blue Peter has made mind-mapping cool among
kids.
How often do teachers forget to use imagery in their own learning as well as in
teaching? Colour, texture, size, variety all help. Memory, says Dr Buzan, is
based on imagery and association, as is creativity. Teachers should understand
which children are predominantly visual, aural or kinaesthetic learners but
help develop all styles in every child.
Mind maps, with their core theme at the centre and key words and images
radiating out in connected, organic lines resemble neurons.
In Kent, Tony Buzan showed the audience a moving image of a brain cell. Babies
who are well cared for had brain cells like jungles; those who had been
neglected had cells like deserts, he said. This is why a teacher’s job is so
important – they help children charge their brain cells. The more they are fed
with information, oxygen and good nutrition plus affection, the more complex
their brains become.
… By Diane
Hofkins, Times Education Supplement, Apr, 2004