BUZAN information
Who is Tony Buzan?
Tony Buzan is the world-renowned inventor of Mind Maps and the multi-million copy bestselling author of Use Your Head, Use your Memory and the Mind Map Book. He appears regularly on television and lectures all over the world. His work has been published in 100 countries and thirty languages.
Tony Buzan has also written books on the subject of Memory (Use Your Memory and Master Your Memory), Speed Reading, Multiple Intelligences (Head First). His most recent books are a series on the multiple intelligences.
Watch a video about Mind Mapping with Tony Buzan
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Memory Skills
Mental training, like physical training, assists in the development of skills for a multitude of practical purposes. When you train your memory and train your imagination, there is a remarkable increase in concentration, study skills and creativity, while simultaneously raising your IQ.
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Mind Maps™
Mind Maps™, developed by Tony Buzan are an effective method of note-taking and useful for the generation of ideas by associations. To make a mind map, one starts in the center of the page with the main idea, and works outward in all directions, producing a growing and organized structure composed of key words and key images. Key features are:
- Organization
- Key Words
- Association
- Clustering
- Visual Memory - Print the key words, use color, symbols, icons, 3D-effects,arrows and outlining groups of words
- Outstandingness - every Mind Map needs a unique center
- Conscious involvement
Mind Maps are beginning to take on the same structure as memory itself. Once a Mind Map is drawn, it seldom needs to be referred to again. Mind Maps help organize information.
Because of the large amount of association involved, they can be very creative, tending to generate new ideas and associations that have not been thought of before. Every item in a map is in effect, a center of another map.
The creative potential of a mind map is useful in brainstorming sessions. You only need to start with the basic problem as the center, and generate associations and ideas from it in order to arrive at a large number of different possible approaches. By presenting your thoughts and perceptions in a spatial manner and by using color and pictures, a better overview is gained and new connections can be made visible.
Mind maps are a way of representing associated thoughts with symbols rather than with extraneous words something like organic chemistry. The mind forms associations almost instantaneously, and "mapping" allows you to write your ideas quicker than expressing them using only words or phrases.
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Speed Reading
Speed reading will improve your study capabilities. Learning how to do it successfully will:
- Increase your reading speeds dramatically.
- Improve your level of concentration and comphrehension.
- Increase your understanding of how your how your eyes and brain work.
- Improve your vocabulary and general knowledge.
- Save your time and build your confidence.
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Brainstorming
The term Brainstorming has become a commonly used word in the English language as a generic term for creative thinking. The basis of brainstorming is a generating ideas in a group situation based on the principle of suspending judgment - a principle which scientific research has proved to be highly productive in individual effort as well as group effort. The generation phase is separate from the judgment phase of thinking.
The term was invented by Alex Osborn and described in his book "Applied Imagination". Other authors have explained brainstorming, and Tony quotes from Michael Morgan's book Creative Workforce Innovation to give the following guidelines:
Brainstorming is a process that works best with a group of people when you follow the following four rules.
- Have a well-defined and clearly stated problem
- Have someone assigned to write down all the ideas as they occur
- Have the right number of people in the group
- Have someone in charge to help enforce the following guidelines:
- Suspend judgment
- Every idea is accepted and recorded
- Encourage people to build on the ideas of others
- Encourage way-out and odd ideas
In Serious Creativity, Edward de Bono describes brainstorming as a traditional approach to do deliberate creative thinking with the consequence that people think creative thinking can only be done in groups. The whole idea of brainstorming is that other people's remarks would act to stimulate your own ideas in a sort of chain reaction of ideas.
Groups are not at all necessary for deliberate creative thinking, and Serious Creativity describes techniques for individuals to use to produce ideas. In a group you have to listen to others and you may spend time repeating your own ideas so they get sufficient attention. Thinking as a group using brainstorming can certainly produce ideas, but individual thinking using techniques such as those described by de Bono should be employed.
de Bono believes that individuals are much better at generating ideas and fresh directions. Once the idea has been born then a group may be better able to develop the idea and take it in more directions than can the originator.
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