Learning how to learn is life’s most important skill
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Tag: Tony Buzan
Mind Maps are a tool introduced by Tony Buzan which help organize our thoughts and ideas through key words in a hierarchical yet creative manner. Mind maps can be used for anything from studying, to tackling problems, to making decisions and even preparing for our next job meeting.
Here are the main steps to creating a mind map:
- Take a blank piece of paper and place it horizontally
- Write the core concept you wish to analyze
- Add branches which represent the main ideas which are linked to that concept
- Each branch can have further branches stemming from it
- Lines representing the branches should be thinner as you get further away from the central point
- Be creative: use colors, use curvy lines, use images which help evoke certain ideas
- DO NOT FOLLOW A LINEAR PATH: you can go back to branches and add or subtract as you wish
Most important of all, find your own mind mapping style. In order to make ourselves be understood by others, we must find our voice!
Here are two TED talks on Mindmaps:
If you want to learn more about mind mapping, you should check out these previous articles:
The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps (part 1)
The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps (part 2): the success formula
We often refer to intelligence as a one single concept. The picture can be far more articulated than we think.
In one of his most acclaimed books, “Head First – 10 ways to tap into your natural genius“, Tony Buzan describes 10 different Intelligences that he divides into three major categories:
a) The creative and Emotional intelligences:
1. Creative intelligence (Create Yourself)
2. Personal Intelligence (You and You)
3. Social Intelligence (You and them)
4. Spiritual Intelligence (Heaven knows!)
b) The Bodily Intelligences
5. Physical Intelligence (Body Talk)
6. Sensual Intelligence (Making sense of your senses)
7. Sexual Intelligence (Intelligent sex)
c) The Traditional IQ Intelligences
8. Numerical Intelligence (Count on Yourself)
9. Spatial Intelligence (Mind the Gap)
10. Verbal Intelligence (The power of words)
If you want to know more about each one read the book!
The best results are achieved by using the right amount of effort in the right place at the right time. And this right amount is usually less than we think we need. In other words, the less unnecessary effort you put into learning, the more successful you’ll be… the key to faster learning is to use appropriate effort. Greater effort can exacerbate faulty patterns of action. Doing the wrong thing with more intensity rarely improves the situation. Learning something new often requires us to unlearn something old.
Tony Buzan
Tony Buzan is the inventor of MindMapping
Image source: http://neurowhoa.blogspot.com/
Mind mapping is a smart and intuitive way to organize ideas, projects or simply a teamwork management. A Mind Map is a graphic method of taking notes, which allows to organize and divide ideas into branches and subsections, using the sheet as a landscape and not just in the usual linear dimension, and preferring catchy images or short banners to long and vague sentences.
Picture: Example of Mindmap by Kurbalija, Gelbstein, Baldi
Tony Buzan is the inventor of Mindmapping. His “The Mind Map Book” of 1993 has been republished several times and contains the guidelines of this technique. Nowadays several mind-mapping software are available, some for free.
Another Repost from Tommaso Coniglio’s Blog http://synapseburning.com as a follow up to the previous post on ideas from books: The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps (part 1)
“In my previous post I explored the concept of mind mapping and the theory behind its effectiveness, based on Tony Buzan’s approach. Now I want to touch on a related topic, to which Buzan dedicates the second part of his mind mapping book: success! Chapter 3 is literally titled: The ultimate success formula (we are definitely in cliché “self-help” territory, and if I didn’t have so much respect for the author, a phrase like that would have stopped me from reading further…)
So what is this special formula for success, and what does it have to do with mind maps?
The “goal of goals”
In 30 years of teaching, Buzan has discovered that most people seem to think that the path to success – the “goal of goals” – is to get better with every trial. This is a deeply flawed formula, because it implies that we should progress in a linear fashion, and that errors, especially after many trials, represent heartbreaking failures. In other words, Buzan maintains that most people are wrought with the fear of failure, which ultimately translates into fear of success, because there can be no success without experiencing a certain amount of “failure” all along the learning path – a path that is everything but linear.
This is why Buzan introduces his own formula for success, which is meant to mirror the way the brain works in learning and adapting to the universe: to learn with every trial. This formula acknowledges that learning is a complex process with a few ups and many downs, and with long periods when it seems like we are making no progress at all. It also puts errors is the proper perspective: they are the conduit for success or, conversely, success is the byproduct of our errors. [….]
Here is a Repost from Tommaso Coniglio’s Blog http://synapseburning.com
Tony Buzan is widely considered the “father” of Mind Maps – a revolutionary way of representing ideas and their interrelations – so I thought it fit for SynapseBurning.com to discuss this powerful tool by exploring his beautifully illustrated book, The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps. I am particularly passionate about the subject since I’ve used mind maps for over 10 years, and they have helped me enormously in writing, planning and problem solving (as a matter of fact, rarely does a week pass without me having the urge to produce a mind map for one reason or another).
Mind maps are extremely simple: starting from a central concept in the middle of the page, you branch out by drawing all the related ideas that come to mind. Each idea, which is represented by not more than a few words, is linked to others through a parent-child relation or through a sibling relation (take a look at the mind map I generated to create this post!).
The creation of a mind map typically consists of two phases: the brainstorming phase, when a very large number of ideas is generated; and the organizing phase, when these ideas are grouped into logical units. Each phase activates a distinct part of the brain (the principle of synergy): in the brainstorming phase, it’s the right side – the creative, intuitive, holistic, imaginative one; in the organizing phase, it’s the left side – the logical, analytical, relational one. This distinction is however mostly theoretical, since in practice brainstorming and organizing occur in rapid sequence or even simultaneously (i.e. organizing as you brainstorm). I personally prefer to keep them as distinct as possible, to free the brainstorming from the constraint of having to organize, which tends to stifle the process (it’s called “going wild”!).
There are three main uses for mind maps.
1. Creating. Whether our endeavor is writing or speaking, mind maps can assist us much better than the most common tool, the linear outline, which narrowly focuses on the organizational aspect and is thus less conducive to brainstorming, which requires absolute freedom to write down ideas without any type of constriction. The productivity guru David Allen said it best when he described his anguish as a child: during a writing assignment in class, he stared at “roman numeral number one” of his outline, without knowing what to put down first! He was waiting for a truly great idea to come… The truth is that at the beginning of any creative endeavor we probably don’t know what is to come first; good ideas won’t jump at us immediately, but that shouldn’t keep us from moving on. The only way to get good ideas is to have many ideas, and mind maps are the most powerful idea-generators. They are also remarkably effective in helping the writer discover connections between the ideas he has generated; he can then “move” them around until he is able to fashion them into a (hopefully) coherent stream of thought. This flexibility is amazing and… truly liberating!
2. Planning/problem solving. If an event or a project needs to happen, we have to find solutions that address all the possible “moving parts” so as to avoid the embarrassing “oops factor” (i.e. “I planned every thing but I forgot to consider x”). Again, thanks to their twofold nature, mind maps can help us dig out heaps of ideas and organize them into logical units that can be in turn broken down into manageable tasks.
3. Learning. When we are confronted with new material, the key is to understand the main ideas and separate them from the details. Mind maps help us do just that. The main branches represent the key points of a book, chapter, lesson etc, while the smaller branches contain less important information, which should be assimilated in relation to the central ideas. There is nothing like seeing both the big picture and the details, all in one. This “juggling” between ideas and their interrelation favours retention thanks to its innate reinforcing mechanism and the activation of both parts of the brain. That’s why it’s so much easier to learn something from a mind map that you’ve created than from flipping back and forth through a book you’ve underlined or notes you’ve scribbled.
Apart from explaining what mind maps are, their uses and why they work, Buzan provides some very useful complementary tips for boosting creativity, learning ability and for being successful, which I discuss in my next post.