The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps. Tony Buzan

activates your whole brain

      

clears your mind of mental clutter

      

allows you to focus on the subject

      

helps demonstrate connections between isolated pieces of information

      

gives a clear picture of both the details and the big picture

      

allows you to group and regroup concepts, encouraging comparisons between them

      

requires you to concentrate on your subject, which helps get the information about it transferred from your short-term memory to your long-term memory

      In The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps you will find many practical examples of how you can use Mind Maps to help plan and organize your life for maximum success, to come up with amazing, creative new ideas, and to absorb new facts and information effortlessly.

      You will also get to know your brain better and find out how to make it easier to learn and remember information. If you understand how to help your brain work for you, you will be able to unlock your full mental and physical potential.

      

The Great Geniuses and Note-making

      When you start Mind Mapping, you will be joining the pantheon of great geniuses who all used the major elements of the Mind Map guidelines to make their thoughts visible, and thus to help them and others make great creative leaps forward in their disciplines. These geniuses include:

      

Leonardo da Vinci, voted ‘The Brain of the Last Millennium’

      

Michelangelo, the great sculptor and artist

      

Charles Darwin, the great biologist

      

Sir Isaac Newton, discoverer of the laws of gravity

      

Albert Einstein, who discovered the laws of relativity

      

Sir Winston Churchill, the renowned political leader and author

      

Pablo Picasso, who changed the face of 20th-century art

      

William Blake, the English visionary, artist and poet

      

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb

      

Galileo, who turned the universe inside-out with his astronomical observations

      

Thomas Jefferson, the polymath and architect of the Declaration of Independence

      

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist

      

Marie Curie, the double Nobel Prize-winning chemist and radiologist

      

Martha Graham, the great dancer and choreographer

      

Ted Hughes, the late English Poet Laureate, regularly praised as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century

      You are in good company! Indeed, it is thought by many that the entire Italian Renaissance was generated for the most part by great creative geniuses who escaped from their linear-thinking prisons. They made their thoughts and ideas visible, not only through lines and words, but also with the equally and often more powerful language of images, drawings, diagrams, codes, symbols, and graphs.

      THE BEST WAY TO MAKE THOUGHTS VISIBLE

      The reason why these great creative geniuses used a powerful language of images to organize, develop, and remember their thoughts is because the brain has a natural aptitude for visual recognition – it is, in fact, practically perfect. This is why you are much more likely to remember information when you use images to represent it.

      There have been many studies to prove this. For example, in one study adults were shown 2,560 photographic slides at the rate of one every 10 seconds. They were then shown 280 pairs of slides, one of which they had already seen, the other of which they had not. The adults had an 85–95 per cent success rate of correctly identifying the slides they had already seen.

      Mind Maps use your brain’s talent for visual recognition to great effect. With their combination of colour, image, and curving branches, they are much more visually stimulating than conventional note-taking methods, which tend to be linear and monochrome. This makes it extremely easy to recall information from a Mind Map.

      

Mind Mappers in History

      LEONARDO DA VINCI

      For a perfect example of a great creative genius using the language of vision to generate thousands of brilliant groundbreaking ideas, you just have to take a look at the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo used images, diagrams, symbols, and illustrations as the purest way to capture, on paper, the thoughts that were teeming in his brain. At the heart of Leonardo’s notebooks, which, because of the manifestations of the sheer creative genius that they contain, are among the most valuable books in the world, are his drawings. These drawings helped Leonardo to explore his thinking in fields as far ranging as art, physiology, engineering, aquanautics, and biology.

      For Leonardo the language of words took second place to the language of images, and was used to label, indicate, or describe his creative thoughts and discoveries – the prime tool for his creative thinking was the language of images.

      GALILEO GALILEI

      Galileo was another of the world’s great creative-thinking geniuses, who, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, helped to revolutionize science by using his own note-taking techniques. While his contemporaries were using traditional verbal and mathematical approaches to the analysis of scientific problems, Galileo made his thoughts visible, like Leonardo, with illustrations and diagrams.

      Interestingly, Galileo was, like Leonardo, a great daydreamer. According to the now famous ‘Legend of the Lamp’, Galileo was idly watching the gentle swaying to-and-fro of the lamps hanging in Pisa Cathedral when he had a ‘Eureka’ experience. Galileo realized that no matter what the range of a lamp’s swing, it always required the same time to complete an oscillation. Galileo developed this observation of ‘isochronism’ into his Law of the Pendulum, applying it to time-keeping and the development of the pendulum