Chapter 1 - The Future

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The Future	73

10. Your amazing brain rediscovered

   Some say the 1970s provided the decade of space exploration; the eighties, the decade of greed; and the nineties relaunched the discovery of inner-space: when we finally came to appreciate and utilize the tremendous potential of the human brain.
  Tony Buzan puts it into perspective. To anyone studying education, he would seem a typically bright product of an excellent education system. He graduated in 1964 from the University of British Columbia, Canada, achieving double honours in psychology, English, mathematics and general sciences.
  But looking back today, he is staggered at what he wasn't taught.
   "At school I spent thousands of hours learning about mathematics. Thousands of hours learning about language and literature. Thousands of hours about the sciences and geography and history. Then I asked myself: How many hours did I spend learning about how my memory works? How many hours did I spend learning about how my eyes function? How many hours in learning how to learn? How many hours in learning how my brain works? How many hours on the nature of my thought, and how it affects my body? And the answer was: none. In other words, I hadn't been actually taught how to use my head."37
  Well after leaving university, he went into a library and asked for a book on how to use his brain. "The librarian said: 'The medical section's over there.' I said: 'I don't want to take my brain out; I want to use it.' And she said: 'Oh, there are no books on that.' And I thought: No books on how to use your most valuable tool. I must write one. And I did."
  Since then he has written eight books. One of them, Use Your Head, has sold over a million copies. It is a recommended introductory text for Britain's Open University. It and the other simple Buzan techniques are essential for anyone joining The Learning Revolution.

11. Cultural nationalism

The more we become a one-world economy, the more we develop a global lifestyle, the more we will see an equal counter movement for what Naisbitt calls cultural nationalism.
  "The more we globalize and become economically interdependent," he says, "the more we do the human thing; the more we assert our distinctiveness, the more we want to hang on to our language, the more

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