Tony Buzan: Popularizer of How to Mind Map

Historians have discovered mind map examples from as far back as the third century when the Phoenician philosopher Porphyry of Tyros used them. But mind maps did not enter the mainstream until educational consultant and author Tony Buzan resurrected and reshaped this brainstorming tactic into a form that could be used widely today. He has been the main proponent of teaching how to mind map since the middle of the last century.

Buzan stands on the shoulders of several others who developed earlier precursors of mind map methods. Allan M. Collins and M. Ross Quillian in particular completed research on “semantic networks,” exploring how learning, creativity and graphical thinking were related. But Buzan also credits the semantic theories of Alfred Korzybski as his inspiration for understanding how to create a mind map. These theories were given life by science fiction novelists such as Robert Heinlein and A.E. van Vogt, but it was Buzan who put them into popular form and made them accessible to the general public.

The Tony Buzan mind mapping technique involves taking a central word and arranging all the concepts or ideas related to that word in ways that radiate out from it. He claims that readers don’t naturally absorb a page of text by scanning it left-to-right, as all English books are currently written. Rather, says Buzan, they tend to scan the page in a non-linear way. So when he teaches how to mind map, he teaches people to use their non-linear right brain to visualize related concepts on a page, as spatial ideas, and then to group them together with similar colors or by relocating them to the same place on the page. This, according to Buzan, reveals relationships and themes that the person might not initially have thought of.

Buzan’s mindmap software, which launched in 2006 and called “iMindMap,” works in tandem with his many books on the topic of making mind maps, as well as with his website, “Buzan World.” He produced a series for the BBC on topics relating to memory and the mind, and since then, in addition to writing his books and promoting his ideas about how to mind map, he has founded or co-founded a great many world organizations that promote memory and knowledge skills. Buzan was one of the twentieth century’s strongest popular voices on the subject of mind skills, and he has continued his work into the present century as well.

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