Tony Buzan - University

At university the complexity and volume of work increased still further, and another crisis began to loom. I found myself sitting in the library, confronted with book loads of notes made during lectures and from the assigned texts, desperately realising that the volume of work these notes represented could in no way be completed in the time that I had remaining before exams.

My first reaction was the slow panic familiar to all studiers, accompanied by the brilliantly created excuses for not getting down to the task at hand, including looking out the window, ‘resting’, needing a drink, needing a snack, going for little walks, and scanning the more-attractive-to-me female students, most of whom were going through similar routines!

The more helpful escape route I devised, was once again a ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ situation, in which the human brain, under pressure, will often come up with the right solution. Indeed what I next devised is so commonly spontaneously generated by students world wide, that it now has a common name: ‘The Cheat Sheet’.

What I did (what I had no choice but to do!) was to scour through my notes, which were supposed to be the essence of the information I had studied, looking for what might be termed ‘the essence of the essence’. I extracted the key words and phrases I had underlined, and was thus able to condense a hundred pages of notes down to ten.

This proved still inadequate, and my next step was to reduce the essence of the essence to the essence of the essence of the essence! This resulted in my having perhaps five to ten small cards on which the key information of an entire hundred-page volume of notes was made into a ‘neutron star’ of knowledge.

This method proved effective up to a point, in that it did indeed enable me to condense the information, and also allowed me to carry it around with me for constant reviewing purposes. When I was actually writing my examination papers, I also found I was more easily able to ‘locate’ the information from my condensed notes.

The method, was, however, far from perfect. I still could somehow, and for reasons that still escaped me, not really get ‘the whole picture’ of the subject I was studying, and would often miss out whole chunks of valuable information in the examination answers I gave. When reviewing my study cards after the exam, I would often find entire cards of knowledge that had somehow completely ‘escaped through the net’ in that critical examination period.

In my senior year at university, the combination of still inadequate note-taking techniques, a massive essay project, and the momentary inability of my memory to hold the entire picture of the topic I was writing about in one giant one mental map, reached a crisis point.

The essay, on the magnificent poets John Donne and William Blake, was one that truly did interest me. I happily went about gathering data and information, oblivious, in my enthusiasm, to the amount of work I was actually generating. When it came to organising, collating, and remembering all the information I had gathered, I realised to my shock and horror that I had generated my own massive Information Overload, and that I was beginning to drown in the very ocean that I had created.

I set about frantically cutting, pasting and sticking the various scraps of data I had gathered, and in the end found myself surrounded by so much ‘confetti’ that I looked like a just-married groom! There was simply too much, and for the first time in my life I failed an essay due to ‘incompletion’.

By this time I was beginning to do graduate lecturing and study, one of my lecturing assignments being the teaching of psychology 101 to first year university students.

I found myself one day lecturing to them on the nature of Recall During Learning, and as usual had prepared my linear notes in order to give the presentation.

I stood in front of the class, and began to read (like so many lecturers sadly do!) my notes to them.

The essence of the lecture I was giving to them was that in a learning period there are four main points of recall, and these are that the human brain recalls most: at the beginning of a learning period; at the end of a learning period those things which are in some way outstanding; and those things which are in some way associated/linked.

My notes were extensive and linear, and my voice, as a lecturer’s voice tends to be when reading from old and pre-prepared notes, was a relative monotone. As I droned on, my students, as most students around the world tend to do, were studiously making linear monotone notes of my linear monotone lecture!

I realised therefore with a sudden shock of both concern and amusement that I had been lecturing to my students on the nature of Recall During Learning in a manner which was in direct contradiction of everything I had been teaching them about how the brain recalls while it is learning!

I realised therefore that if I wanted my students to understand and remember what it was that I was teaching, I had to use the principles of Recall During Learning in my lecture. Analysing the four points, I also realised that primacy and recency were sub-divisions of Outstanding: the reason why we learn the first and last things is because they are the first and last things and therefore stand out. I was left, consequently, with only two main Recall-During-Learning-Principles to apply to my lecturing: Association and Outstandingness.

It will be useful at this point for you to go through the same Thought Exercise that I myself went through at that time. I wondered what techniques and approaches I could use in a lecture to assist my students with their overall learning and very specifically with their recall of what they had been learning. In the spaces below, jot down your own thoughts on how you would improve your own lecturing once you had realised the importance of these two principles.

Take a blank piece of paper and write down all those things you could use in a speech/presentation/lecture to make your lecture more outstanding:

Then write down all those things you could use in a speech/presentation/lecture to make your lecture more associative and linked:

I began to apply the ideas to my lecturing and found a number of predicted and surprise benefits: my students were certainly able to recall better what I taught them. In addition, the surprise and added benefit was that my lectures became far more creative, and that I actually began to enjoy them! Fortunately so did my students, and the positive spiral had begun: the more creativity applied to the lecturing, and more Recall-During-Learning knowledge similarly applied, the more everybody enjoyed, the more everybody learnt, and the more everybody remembered!

It gradually began to dawn on me that all this thinking and information could be applied to note-taking, for what else were notes in this context other than tools to help Recall During Learning? I therefore went through an identical exercise to that you have just completed on presentations and lectures, with note-taking itself. I recommend the same exercise for you. On your paper, note down:

All those techniques and approaches you could use in note-taking to make things stand out.

All those things you could use in note-taking to associate or link things with each other.

Compare your own answers with the following:

Outstanding:	Associating:
Colour Size Dimension Spacing Imagery Humour Shading Underlining Capitalising Bold printing Symbolising	Lines Arrows Symbols Colours Connecting in space Shape Size Style

My brain was on the verge of a note-taking and recall revolution that looked as if it would contradict a large portion of what I and my fellow students around the world had been taught!

Surprisingly, although my lectures continued to improve on all fronts, my note-taking lagged far behind, due primarily to the twin facts of my assumption that I was utterly hopeless at art and would never be able to draw anything more than a stick figure (a deeply false assumption, especially in view of the recent work of Dr. Betty Edwards, and the artist Lorraine Gill indicating that everyone can learn to draw well) and the at-that-time still deep-rooted agreement with that other false societal belief, that images and colours were somehow immature and childish, and therefore inappropriate for a mature person such as myself (and I was only 25!!).

In addition to the two reasons given above, a more fundamental and valid reason was that I still lacked an ‘Integrating Principle’ that would somehow tie things together. It was during this time that two new discoveries provided the final pieces for this giant mental jigsaw, and paved the way for a new, integrative memory technique.

First I discovered the work of Dr. Evelyn Wood, and her approach to recall note-taking. Dr. Wood recommended breaking away from the linear prison, and taking notes in the form of words, phrases or sentences on lines that emanated from a central geometric figure such as a circle, triangle or square. (This did not stretch my artistic capability at that time!)

The second vital discovery came while reading the wonderful novel The Pawns of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt. In this novel the author discusses sane, unsane and insane behaviour, and introduces the concept of General Semantics, the theory of thought which states that every single thought you and I have is multi-ordinate, meaning that every thought, be it a word, an image, a number, a smell, a taste or a colour etc. is like a little sun that radiates out all forms of associations, and that these associations themselves link to other associations, forming a giant ‘Internet of the Mind’ in the brain of the thinker. It is immediately apparent from this theory that every individual will have an extremely unique universe of thought, and that we humans are therefore far more complex and unique than had previously been thought.

The second main point of this theory is that it emphasises that all knowledge is a giant map of associative networks, containing billions of sub-maps each emanating from its own special-subject centre.

 

Note: Copyright permission granted by Buzan Centres and used enthusiastically.