Use Your Head

date May 30, 2007
authors Tony Buzan
reading time 2 mins
  • Book Title: Use Your Head
  • Author: Tony Buzan
  • Year written/published: 1974
  • My Comment: I loved the part about the Mind Maps. A great book nontheless!
  • Contents page:
  1. Edward Hughes Story
  2. Your brain is better than you think
  3. How Human brain has been Reined in
  4. Reading faster and more efficiently
  5. Memory
  6. Mind Maps - an intro to the nature of words and thoughts
  7. Mind Maps - The Natural Laws
  8. Mind Maps - Advanced Methods and Uses
  9. Mind Map Prganic Study Technique
  10. New Directions

Some extracts:

Some false beliefs about Reading:

  • Words must be read one at a time
  • Reading faster than 500 wpm is impossible
  • Faster reader is not able to appreciate
  • Higher speeds give lower concentration
  • Average reading speeds are antural and therefore the best

SMASHIN SCOPE of memory - The important thing in this and all other memory systems is to make sure that the rhyming word and the word to be remembered are totally and securely linekd together.

  • Sensuality 
  • Movement
  • Association
  • Sexuality
  • Humour
  • Imagination
  • Number
  • Symbolism
  • Colour
  • Order
  • Positive Images
  • Exaggeration

Mind Mapping laws:

  1. Start with a coloured image in the centre
  2. Images throughout your Mind Map
  3. Words should be printed
  4. The printed words should be in lines and each line should be connected to other lines
  5. One word per line
  6. Use colours
  7. Mind should be left ‘free’ as possible

Advanced Mind Map - there are many devices we can use to make such notes:

  • Arrows
  • Codes
  • Geometrical shapes
  • Artistic 3 D
  • Creativity Images
  • Colour

How the brain was used by geniuses…

At first glance history seemed to deny this finding however, for most of the ‘Great Brains’ appeared very lopsided in mental terms: Einstein and other great scientists seemed predominantly ‘left cortex’ dominant, while Picasso, Cezanne and othee great artists and musicians to be ‘ right cortex’ dominant. A more thorough investigation unearthed some fascination truths: Einstein failed at school in Fresh and numbered among his acitvities violin playing, art, sailing, and imagination games!!

Hologram as a model for Brain (and not a camera)…

The holograph certainly approximates more closely the 3-D nature of our imagincations, but its storage capacity is puny compared to the millions of images that our brain can randomly call up at an instant’s notice.

graph showing how properly spaced reviews can keep recall rate high! Linear History of Speech and Print

For the last few 100 years, it has been popularly thought that man’s mind worked in a linear or line-like manner. This belief was help primarily because of the increase reliance on our 2 main methods of communication - speech and print.. …. The linear emphasis overflowed into normal writing or note taking procedures. Virtually everyone was and still is prained in school to take notes in sentences or vertical lists. The acceptance of this way of thinking is so long-standing that little has been done to contradict it. However, recent evidence shows that brain to be far form multi-dimensional and pattern making, suggesting that in the speech/print arguments there must be fundamental flaws. recall rate…