Inspiring psychology or simple nonsense? Tony Buzan is eager to teach us how to map our minds for just €50. Kate Holmquist reports
Would you pay €50 to hear Tony Buzan talk about mind-mapping, the concept he claims to have invented? If you're turned on by hearing a guru who has generated a cult-like industry worth 100 million (dollars, euro, pounds, who cares?) by gushing pseudoscience, then maybe you would.
Lots of people find comfort in pop psychology, even when the person peddling it isn't a psychologist. They find inspirational speakers inspiring. They, or their companies, can spare the €50.
Speaking from Mexico, where he says his method is being used as a basis for redesigning that country's education system (along with Singapore and Malaysia), Buzan punctuates his passionate argument that to succeed in this century we must be intellectual capitalists with impressive-sounding credentials.
He was a keynote speaker at the Great Education Debate in the UK, arguing that children need to learn how to learn, rather than gaining knowledge by rote, a theme favoured by many educationalists since the 1960s and a bit of common sense.
He has toured China meeting the illiterate masses, has worked with disadvantaged children for a BBC series, In Search of Genius, and says that IBM's accounts department saved millions of dollars by using mind maps.
The Irish have a special place in his heart because an appearance on the Late Late Show in 1974 launched his international career. It led to the BBC series, Use Your Head, and a jet-setting lifestyle that has clocked up enough air miles to get him to the moon and back five times, as he likes to boast.
His premise, written and re-written in 90 books published in 30 languages in 100 countries, is that 99 per cent of us use our logical left brain at the expense of our creative right brain. He also states, over and over again, that most of us use only 10 per cent of our brain's capacity.
These two claims don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. Unless we suffer from a neurological disorder or injury, we use both sides of our brains all the time. Some research about 100 years ago showed that we were only using 10 per cent of it at any one time, but that's not a bad thing. If all your neurones were firing simultaneously, you'd collapse from a brain seizure.
The notion that there are right-brained people and left-brained people is just that - a notion. Many people have language and reasoning skills on one side of the brain and emotional and visual/spatial perceptions on the other, while many other people have these skills on both sides.
The brain seems to have a capacity to develop skills in any area. When young people lose a part of their brain, another part can take over and develop the lost abilities. The asymmetry of the brain is part of what makes us human and healthy. There's scientific evidence that the disruption of this asymmetry may have a role to play in mental illness. There is also research indicating that when some depressed people look at the world through their left eye, they have more negative emotional perceptions than when they look through their right eye.
Many creative people have difficulties balancing their emotions, while some of those with amazing memories for maths and science lack emotional intelligence. It's a fascinating area that neuroscientists are only beginning to understand, but whether using mind-mapping could change the way we think is another story.
Buzan believes it can. Mind-mapping was used by Leonardo Da Vinci and Picasso, among others. Buzan has gone to the trouble of registering the "world" copyright to the term mind map, but that hasn't stopped others from creating their own systems.
They probably needn't worry about copyright because the mind map has been used since the third century. Call it what you will - brain-storming, visualisation, problem-solving, cartooning or even doodling - we do it and we've always done it.
Buzan says his "original" concept of the mind map was inspired by the scientologist A E van Vogt, an acclaimed science fiction writer who fell out with L Ron Hubbard in the early days of the cult. (It was Hubbard who said something along the lines of "anyone can create unimaginable wealth by creating a new religion").
Hubbard went on to develop dianetics, a way of understanding what he saw as the "two minds" - one which holds on to memories, which can be damaging and limiting, and another that holds intellectual capacity, which can be boosted by "clearing" bad memories. Again, it's a type of mind-mapping that's captured the popular imagination, or Tom Cruise's imagination anyway.
Buzan's style of mind-mapping involves drawing a central image on a piece of paper, then drawing radial lines out from it to illustrate various aspects of a concept. Some Irish secondary schools teach a version of mind-mapping as a study skill. But research found that students' memory increased by only 10 per cent using mind-mapping as opposed to traditional note-taking, and that the benefit lasted about a week.
Anyone who thinks that mind maps don't work isn't using his method, Buzan argues. The Buzan mind map will change your life but it takes a week to learn and months of practice, he says. Buzan also says research into molecules has given scientists the capacity to make gold from cabbage. Now there's a seminar you might feel would be worth €50.
