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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
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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