Tony Buzan has been one of the main activists in getting the basics of how to mind map out into the public sphere. An educational consultant and prolific author on many different topics relating to memory and the mind, he has taken earlier ideas on how to make a cognitive map of all the ideas surrounding a central topic, and crystallized them into his own modern approach. These ideas may first have been conceived by philosophers a few centuries ago, but Buzan took them out of the philosophy books and put them into his own more popular books, explaining them in a way that people today can understand.

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.

Buzan believes that mind mapping techniques work with how people actually read and absorb information from a page. He claims that they absorb information not by scanning left-to-right, top-to-bottom as everyone is taught, but in a much more visual, relational way. So when he teaches how to mind map, he uses a much more right-brain way of collecting information, putting ideas on a page and relating them in a more spatial way, rather than in the traditional linear way.

In 2006, Buzan released a mindmapping software program called “iMindMap, and he has published many books on memory, speed reading, and of course on creating maps of the mind itself. He also has a website called “Buzan World,” where he promotes his ideas. Over the years he has founded many organizations such as the Brain Foundation, the Brain Trust Charity, the World Memory Championships, and the World Championships of the Brain. But although he is well known for exploring all aspects of the mind, he is probably best known for his promotion and education on all aspects of how to mind map.

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