The Official Biography of Tony Buzan

Raymond Keene OBE

• Publisher: Filament Publishing
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781908691538
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Take a look inside the mind of Tony Buzan, the man who invented Mind Mapping and taught the world a whole new way of thinking. Read about the inspirations, influences, discoveries and challenges on his journey to help royalty, global figures, celebrities, governments, and business leaders, and how he has transformed educational theory and practice around the world. In Raymond Keene's comprehensive book, hear from Tony in his own words about his passion for Mental Literacy and his belief that Genius is present in every one of us. Tony Buzan is the inventor of Mind Mapping, and has authored or co-authored over 100 books that have appeared in 30 languages. He is the founder and President of the Brain Foundation, Brain Trust Charity, and the World Memory Championships.

PART ONE - Enigma and Solutions

1. Dodging The Doodle Bugs
2. The Redefinition Of Intelligence And The Re-Evaluation Of Knowledge
3. Mightier Than The Sword
4. Praeceptor Orbis Terrarum (Teacher of the World)
5. The Franklin Lecture - Unlocking Potential
6. Close Encounters With Michael Jackson
7. Master Of Memory
8. Mens Sana - Mind Sports (A Healthy Mind)
9. In Corpore Sano - Sportsman (A Healthy Body)
10. Loving Humanity

“Did you know that you use less than 1% of your brain?

The good news is that Mind Mapping can help you to access the other 99%!”

Tony Buzan

1. Dodging The Doodle-Bugs

Tony’s Early Life

Tony’s own first memories were at the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, during the closing stages of the Second World War, when he was between two and two-and-a-half years old. He remembers vividly standing between the thick velvety curtains in his living room, sandwiched between their warmth and texture and the cold panes of glass that looked out on to his back garden.

Coming over the horizon, accompanied by an increasing, rumbling roar that eventually shook the foundations on which he was standing, came a giant squadron of Royal Air Force bombers. To his young eye, they looked mysterious, fantasmagoric and awesome.

Shortly after the flight of the bombers, his second and equally vivid memory was of the shrill and tantalizing whistle of a doodlebug bomb, which thundered overhead and which, as was their wont, suddenly went silent before plummeting to earth, one knew not where.

After the mandatory few seconds of silence, the doodlebug struck earth some few hundred yards from his family house. The impact sent tremors through the building, and the force of the explosion shattered the thick and corrugated glass of their front door. The glass had been bomb-blown into the front hall and now lay shimmering on the hallway floor.

Tony recalls: “I remember looking with delight and enchantment at this cascade of reflected and refracted rainbows and beautifully clean-cut edges. I picked them up gently, as one would a delicate animal, already knowing at that early age that glass and sharp edges were dangerous. The texture of the glass, the beauty of the multi-coloured light, and the magic of the whole splintered fairyland are etched as vividly in my mind today as the reality was in my eyes at the time.”

Both his media and travelling career started at the age of eight. During that year he travelled to his first foreign country, and spent a wonderful summer holiday with his classmates, somewhat ironically, in Germany along the River Rhine. These were halcyon days that began to open his eyes to the wider world. During the same year, he experienced his first media appearance, being interviewed in the Whitstable Gazette for his second prize in the town’s pet show, and for his opinions on animals.

In 1954, after severe floods in England, he, his parents and his brother Barry emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada where he was to experience a very different culture from that in which he had been brought up.

One of the first major revelations was the fact that England, which, because of the pink pervading the world maps, he had come to believe was ‘the biggest country in the world’ was so tiny that you could fit five of them into the province of British Columbia alone! Further revelations were to follow in rapidly accelerating succession first, though, comes a story from his early years in England.

. . . .

2. The Redefinition Of Intelligence And The Re-Evaluation Of Knowledge

We are at the dawn of young Tony Buzan’s encounter with Learning, Knowledge, Memory and Intelligence, and an amazingly insightful and significant story is about to be told.

In Tony’s own words:

“When I was seven years old, my family moved to Whitstable, a small seaside fishing village, near Canterbury, on the northern coast of Kent. I was in the first year of Whitstable Primary Boys School, my best friend was called Barry, and our only and all-consuming interest was nature.

At the end of the day we could not wait to get out of school in order to play in the woods, fields, and by the rivers and dykes, studying and exalting in the glory of nature, and collecting living things for our homes’ mini zoos.

Barry had an amazing capacity: he could run into a field, make birds and butterflies fly away, and, as they flew over the horizon, could identify them all by flight pattern alone, while I was mumbling Cabbage White, Sparrow, by which time they had all gone. His perceptual and identifying abilities were phenomenal. One day in school, we boys were informed that we were going to be divided into four different classes: 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D. We were also told that it made no difference to which class we were assigned. It took us a microsecond to realise that 1A was for the academic ‘A ‘student, and that 1D was for the dunces, dimwits, dullards, and dense boys.

I was put in class 1A; my best friend Barry in class 1D.

In each class, the seat in which you sat was determined by the result of the last test you had taken. The top boy sat in the back right hand seat, the second in the seat next to that, and so on along the back row, then snaking down the class to the front row where the bottom student in that test sat in the front right hand seat.”

Where, in general, sat little Tony Buzan?

“Never in seat 1 or seat 2. Those prestigious locations were always reserved for either Mummery or Epps, who always came first or second, no matter what the subject. Little Tony Buzan was somewhere else along the back row, or in the middle of the class.

One day our teacher, Mr. Hake, was asking us some pretty dull questions including such as:

• Name two fish you could find in an English stream (there are over a 100!)
• What is the difference between an insect and a spider (there are over 15!)
• What is the difference between a butterfly and a moth (again there are over 15!)

A few days later, our teacher came into the class and announced: ‘Boys, someone has scored a perfect mark in a test!’ Everyone, including me, looked at Mummery and Epps to see which one of them had done it again.

The teacher then announced, to my stunned and total surprise, ‘Buzan!’

I knew that he had made a mistake, because I knew that in every test we had taken I had either left answers out, or had definitely given incorrect answers.

Nevertheless, we all had to take our books, pens and writing materials out of our little wooden flip top desks, and move to our new position. For the first time in my life, I was sitting in seat number 1, looking, for the first time, at the right profiles of Mummery and Epps!

Pleasing as this all was, I knew that my triumph was going to be short-lived, because Mr. Hake would quickly discover that he had made a mistake.

He then began to hand out the papers, eventually coming to me. He plonked a paper in front of me, and to my surprise it had 100%! Well done Boy!

“Top marks! Points for your team! And my name in my handwriting!

“When I looked at the paper, I realised that it was filled with the answers. I had casually written down to the dull questions he had asked about nature a few days earlier.

My immediate thought and reaction was: that wasn’t a test! I could have named him 50 fishes from English rivers; many differences between insects and spiders; many differences between butterflies and moths, so it wasn’t a test.

After a few minutes, it began to dawn on me that it was a test, and that when Mummery and Epps got their high and perfect scores, it was because they had the same relationship with the subjects, in which they were scoring well, as I had with nature. So it was a test! And I was, for the first time in my life, Number One!

It felt good. For about five minutes. Then the realisation dawned on me that would, over time, transform the direction of my life.

The realisation was that the system had identified me as number one, while, sitting at the very bottom of the combined snake of 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D, was my best friend Barry. And who knew more about nature little Barry? Or little Tony? Little Barry, by far! He could identify, by flight pattern alone a butterfly, moth or bird. In the real and comparative knowledge of nature, Barry should have been sitting half a mile to the right of me in terms of his excellence. He was the real number one, and yet the system was identifying him as all the Ds.”

From the moment of that realisation on, little Tony became an intellectual delinquent, asking:

Who has the right to say who is smart?

Who has the right to say who is not smart?

What is smart anyway?

And how can my teachers and school get it so absolutely, and antipodally, wrong?!

“The pain and discomfort of being named number one at the expense of the real number one, who also happened to be my best friend, which made it even more painful, grew over the years into a passion for the identification and nurturing of the multiple intelligences that we all have.”

Tony’s reactions to this unexpected triumph veered between the suspicions that there must have been a flaw in the marking system, to the belief that somehow he was an impostor. Both of these gnawing doubts were not true.

So, as he accustomed himself to his new found esteem, a fresh nagging thought burgeoned in his mind. Officially he was now the school kid possessed of the greatest knowledge of nature. There, though, languishing and marooned at the lowest ebb of the worst class, was his mate Barry. Barry was, in Tony’s estimation, the greatest expert on nature that he knew. Barry’s nature IQ was phenomenal as, indeed, was his accumulated knowledge of nature and his ability to recall nature facts at will.

This Ievel of IQ and this store of knowledge was, however, not officially recognised, not least because Barry’s skills exceeded, by such an enormous margin, what the school required children to know about nature, that it travelled beneath the radar of their conventional antennae. This leads us to the ancient Socratic question in a new and provocative format: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who guards the guards?

Who, and by what right, decides who is intelligent and who is not, and who decides which repositories of knowledge itself are relevant and which to be denied? The implications, not lost on the young Buzan brain, were, and remain, momentous, not to say monstrous.

Modern mass systems of education are designed, as with so many contemporary institutions, to create one-size-fits-all assessments and solutions. In gigantic state-led organisations, the needle of genius may be mislaid in the proverbial haystack of mediocrity. Just consider the extent to which immense reserves of individual, but nonconformist, talent might be overlooked and wasted in such juggernautical operations.

In Tony’s staggeringly precocious insight into this anomaly of evaluation, assessment and selection, one observes the very roots, the primeval stirrings of what was destined to become a redefinition, even more, a revolution in the perception and drawing out of the varying and radiantly divergent capacities of the human brain. It led on to alternative methodologies for note-taking and creativity, such as The Mind Map, to the BBC documentary, In Search of Genius. In this ground-breaking documentary, failing school kids were offered parameters for recognising their own hitherto dismissed potential.

Tony’s early insight had formed the basis for the belief that geniuses are not born fully armed, like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus, but nurtured through a gradualistic process which welcomes their talents and which both fosters and rewards their determination to succeed. Versions of defining intelligence have varied since IQ tests were first introduced in the early twentieth century, but Tony’s definition of intelligence as ‘the ability to handle the second by second challenges which life throws at you’, has always struck me as the most satisfactory, and is the reason that I have described him as the modern Aristotle, as Dante put it of the original, “The master of the men who know!”

Years later, further events were to add similar power, conviction and impetus to Tony’s desire to bring about tectonic shifts in the way that children are both appreciated and educated.

When Tony was young he was continually questioning authority, asking, ‘Who says who is intelligent or not?’ and ‘What is intelligence?’, and ‘Can it be trained and improved?’ He admits that he was also singularly un-athletic, and hated all forms of physical sports, which were obligatory at school!

Tony continues: “At the age of 13, my life and attitudes were transformed. I had vaguely begun to comprehend that a fit body was attractive to girls! An athletic friend of mine introduced me to push-ups, chin-ups and sit-ups.

“In the cooperative/competitive nature of friends, we began to compare notes and I tried to match him. At first my performances were pathetic!

“Gradually though, as I persisted, my results imp...

Table of contents

• The Official Biography of Tony Buzan
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chronology
• How Tony Met Ray
• Part One - Enigma and Solutions
• Part Two - Mind Mapping
• Part Three - Global Mental Literacy
• Part Four - Spiritual Progression
• Part Five - Poetry and Art
• Part Six - Appendices