Mind mapping · 3 min
Where did mind mapping come from?
The need behind the idea: why Tony Buzan looked for a note-taking method that fits the way the brain works.
A better way to take notes
In the 1960s, the American neuroscientist Professor Roger Sperry carried out his famous ‘split-brain’ studies, showing that the two hemispheres of the brain specialise in different functions. This work earned him the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
During the same period, Tony Buzan was teaching the psychology of learning and memory. Inspired in part by Sperry’s research, he realised that the way we usually take notes (linear, sequential and made up only of words and numbers) does not suit the way our brains work. He set out to discover what a brain-friendly way of taking notes might look like.
At the time, Buzan framed this in terms of the left and right sides of the brain. Today, neuroscience tells us that both hemispheres work together in almost everything we do, and the idea of ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ people is a myth. But Buzan’s core insight still holds: conventional notes rely almost entirely on words, lists and sequence, and leave out much of what helps us understand and remember.
Radiating from a centre
Colour, images, imagination, the ‘big picture’ and a sense of dimension, he argued, needed to become part of how we take notes and how we think.
Buzan set out his ideas in detail in the BBC television series Use Your Head, which attracted a large and enthusiastic audience.
His central idea was that brain-friendly notes should radiate out from a centre, just as so many organisms in nature do.
Look at nature and you will see the pattern everywhere: a tree’s trunk with branches that go from thick to thin; the veins of a leaf spreading from the main vein into ever finer ones; the nerve cells in our brains connecting with one another through branches that radiate from their centres.
From note-taking to thinking method
In the 1970s, Tony Buzan introduced the mind map to the world, arguing that if all natural organisms grow outwards from a centre, then we, as part of nature, should take notes in the same radiant way, following the natural flow of our thoughts.
First used as a note-taking technique in the 1970s, mind maps have since evolved into a powerful method for learning and thinking. Today, with their number of users growing every day and working visually more popular than ever, they have become an essential tool, used rather like a Swiss Army knife.
