Читать книгу The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps - Тони Бьюзен, Tony Buzan - Страница 11

The brain regulates all bodily functions; it controls our most primitive behaviour – eating, sleeping, keeping warm; it is responsible for our most sophisticated activities – the creation of civilization, of music, art, science, and language. Our hopes, thoughts, emotions, and personality are all lodged – somewhere – inside there. After thousands of scientists have studied it for centuries, the only word to describe it remains: ‘AMAZING’.

Professor R Ornstein, author of The Psychology of Consciousness

Overview of Chapter 2:

How Well Do You Know Your Brain?

Our Evolving Knowledge of Our Evolving Brains

The ‘Left and Right’ Brain

The Brain Principle of Synergy

The Learning Principle of Repetition

Knowing about how your brain works can be likened to knowing how to drive a car: the better your knowledge of driving and how to do it, the better at it you will be. If you understand how your brain likes to learn and function, it will reward you by working better for you. You will find it easier to come up with inspired ideas, to remember information when you need it, and to find creative solutions to problems. As you will soon discover, the way you draw a Mind Map reflects the manner in which your brain likes to think. Mind Maps will help you unlock the full potential of your brain. First of all, let’s delve into the secrets of your brain. We’ll start with a little quiz.

How Well Do You Know Your Brain?

We use our brains all the time, but how much do we actually know about them? Take a look at the mini brain quiz below to find out how much you know about your personal powerhouse.

Mini Brain Quiz

1. The number of brain cells in the human brain is:

a) 100,000?

b) 1,000,000?

c) 10,000,000?

d) 100,000,000?

e) 1,000,000,000?

f) 1,000,000,000,000?

2. The brain of an insect like the bee contains millions of brain cells. True/False?

3. The ‘population’ of brain cells in your head is larger than the number of human beings on planet earth. True/False?

4. We have been able to photograph a still picture of a brain cell, but have not yet been able to video a living brain cell. True/False?

5. The great geniuses in history such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein probably reached their maximum potential. True/False?

6. The human brain can grow new connections between brain cells as it ages but cannot generate entirely new cells. True/False?

7. The number of patterns of thought possible for your brain is equal to the number of atoms in:

a) A molecule?

b) A cathedral?

c) A mountain?

d) The moon?

e) The earth?

f) Our solar system including the sun?

g) Our galaxy and its 200 billion stars?

h) None of these?

8. Your brain is hard-wired – there is not much you can do to change its abilities. True/False?

9. The world’s best computers are now better than the human brain in their basic potential. True/False?

10. The cerebral cortex is the part of the brain normally referred to as the ‘left/right brain’. True/False?

11. The right cerebral cortex is the creative side of the brain. True/False?

12. The left cerebral cortex is the academic/intellectual side of the brain. True/False?

Answers are in Answers to Mini Brain Quiz. How many did you get right? Did some of the answers amaze you? Prepare to be even more impressed at how incredible that amazing brain of yours truly is.

Our Evolving Knowledge of Our Evolving Brains

Although the brain as we know it began evolving some 500 million years ago, the brain’s knowledge of the brain has a much, much shorter history. As little as 2,500 years ago humankind knew virtually nothing about the brain and its internal workings. Before the Ancient Greeks, the mind was not even considered to be part of the human body, but was thought to exist as some form of ethereal vapor, gas or disembodied spirit.

Surprisingly, the Greeks did not get us that much further, and even Aristotle – their most famous philosophical thinker and the founder of modern science – concluded that the centre of sensation and memory was located in the heart!

During the Renaissance in the late 14th century, a period of great intellectual awakening, it was finally realized that the centre of thought and consciousness was located in the head, and it was not until the late 20th century that the really great strides forward in our understanding of our own brains were made.

These developments are so significant that they are already changing the foundations of psychology, education, and business, and are emphasizing a fact sensed by many but until now impossible to ‘prove’ – that the average brain is far more capable than we ever believed!

A number of recent findings stand out as particularly significant.

One of the most important developments is the awareness by the brain of the brain itself. Consider this:

95 percent of all that the human race has ever discovered about the internal workings of its own brain has been discovered in the last 10 years!

What this means is that the human race is at a turning-point in evolution, where we are suddenly discovering amazing facts about our own brains (your brain!): we are beginning to realize that the bio-computer we all have between our ears is infinitely more powerful than we had ever thought.

Your Brain Cell – a History of Our Knowledge

For centuries the human brain had been considered merely as a three-and-a-half pound structureless, characterless lump of gray matter. And then the intrigue began. With the development of the microscope it was discovered that the brain’s crumpled outer layer was far more complex than had previously been suspected. It was found that the brain was composed of thousands of intricate and tiny rivers of blood that coursed throughout it, ‘feeding’ the brain.

Next came the revolutionary and revelationary discovery that the brain seemed to be composed of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots, the nature and function of which remained a mystery for a while. Then, as the power of the microscope increased, it was found that there were many more ‘dots’ than previously had been thought, and that each one appeared to have tiny extensions emanating from it. This launched a scientific saga similar to that of astronomy – in which the telescope and its discovery of the stars, solar systems, galaxies and clusters of galaxies was the twin of the microscope and its penetration of the universe of your brain.

As the super-sensitive electron microscope appeared on the scene, scientists observed that each brain was composed of millions of tiny cells, called neurons. The body of each brain cell was found to be astoundingly complex, with a centre, or nucleus, and a large number of branches radiating from it in all directions. The cells looked like beautifully complex trees that had been able to grow branches in all directions round it, and in three dimensions. In fact, if you look at the illustration opposite of the brain cell, you will see that it, not surprisingly, has the same shape and structure as a Mind Map!

THE NUMBER OF YOUR BRAIN CELLS

The next stage in this Star Trek-like exploration of the microscopic universe was truly mind-boggling. In the last half of the 20th century, it was discovered that the number of brain cells was not just a few million – it was a million million! 167 times the number of people on the planet!

The significance of this number would be immense, even if each brain cell could perform only very basic operations. If each brain cell were, however, immensely powerful, the significance of their number would take scientists into realms that are almost supernatural.

How powerful are these brain cells? Well, read on …

Brain Cell Power!

Before we consider the power of the human brain cell, let’s first analyse the brain capacity of an insect such as a bee. Why? Because, surprisingly, the bee (and every other living animal) has the same super-bio-computer chip as a human. What a bee can do with only a few brain cells puts into sharp relief your potential using millions of millions of the same brain cells.

Mind Map exercise: what can a bee do?

Take a large piece of paper and quickly Mind Map all the things you think a bee can do. You could start by drawing a bee as your central image and then add main branches with ideas of the major things you think of, such as ‘FLY.’ Add sub-branches to these main branches to fully explore each of the main ideas you have.

When you start thinking about it, bees can do the most amazing things with their brains. They can:

1 Build. Bees are among the master architects of the insect world, constructing intricate and complex ‘high-rises’ that can house entire communities.

2 Care for their young.

3 Collect pollen and information.

4 Communicate. By movement, sound, and gesture, bees can communicate to others intricate information concerning plant locations and types of blossom.

5 Count. Bees can locate chosen objects again by remembering the number of significant items on the way to the desired goal.

6 Dance. When bees return to the hive they perform a complex dance that conveys to their companions the location and navigational information about a new find.

7 Distinguish other bees.

8 Eat.

9 Fight. Not only fight, but fight with such ferocity, focus, speed, and coordination of their multiple fighting appendages, that they make even speeded-up karate films look slow and pathetic by comparison.

10 Fly.

11 Hear. Just like us.

12 Learn. See points 4 and 5 above.

13 Live in an organized community and function appropriately (compare with our own behavior!).

14 Make decisions. Bees can decide to change the temperature of their hive, to convey or not convey information, to fight and to migrate.

15 Navigate. On a miniature scale, the bee is the equivalent of any of our most sophisticated aircraft. Imagine trying to land (which a bee can) on a waving leaf in a strong and gusting wind.

16 Produce honey.

17 Regulate temperature. When the hive becomes too hot, a group of bees will work in harmony to ‘reset’ the temperature of the hive to within one-tenth of a degree centigrade, using their wings as a giant communal fan, and beating cool air through the hive until the desired temperature is reached.

18 Remember. They could not count, communicate or survive if they didn’t!

19 Reproduce.

20 See, including ultraviolet light.

21 Smell.

22 Swarm in more intricate formation than jet fighter squadrons.

23 Taste.

24 Think.

25 Touch.

The Mind Map opposite sums up all the things a bee can do.

How many brain cells does the bee have in order to do all these things? Millions? No. Fewer than a million. A bee has approximately 960,000 brain cells.

If a bee can do all this with its relatively few thousand brain cells, are we making the most of our million, million cells? Probably not!

The Intricate Structure of Brain Cells

As microscopes became more sophisticated, scientists discovered more and more about our brains. They saw that each cell had its own centre, a nucleus, and that this nucleus was much more than simply ‘the centre of the brain cell’. It was, rather, the brain cell’s own ‘brain’ and, based on what we know about the bee, a tiny brain of magnificent power. Literally, a brain within a brain, within your brain!

Then, at the end of the 20th century, another miraculous discovery was made. The Max Planck Laboratory filmed, for the first time in human history, a living brain cell. It had been taken from a living brain and was contained in a deep rectangular channel of brain fluid in a petri dish under the electron-microscope. The film, which has changed the lives of all those who have seen it, showed this amazing little being to have a completely independent intelligence. With its hundreds of baby-like hands, like an amoeba, it extended and retracted, sensitively and focusedly reaching out to every atom of the space in its newly confined universe – looking for connection – a moving Mind Map. It was like seeing the most impossibly delicate, sensitive, and intelligent being from outer space. How, then, does each one of these amazing brain-cell creatures relate to others?

THE BRAIN CELL AND ITS FRIENDS

Your brain cell operates by forming fantastically complex links with tens of thousands of its neighbours and companions. These links are made primarily when its main and biggest branch (the axon) makes multiple thousands of connections with the little buttons on many thousands of many branches of many thousand other brain cells.

Each contact point is known as a synapse. When an electromagnetic bio-chemical message (the nerve impulse) surges down the axon, it is released through the synaptic button, which is connected to the dendritic spine. Between the two there is a tiny space.

The nerve impulse fires hundreds of thousands of the spheres called vesicles across the synaptic gap in what, in the microcosmic world, must look like a mega Niagara Falls. These vesicles journey at lightning speed across the synaptic gap and attach, like millions of messenger pigeons, to the surface of the dendritic spine. The messages are then transmitted along the branches of the receiving brain cell to its own axon, which then transmits the message through its branches to other brain cells, and so on and on and on, creating the intricate pathway of a thought. These pathways are maps, the internal, physical Mind Maps of your thought. The Mind Maps you make on paper reflect these Mind Maps in your head.

A brain cell and its connections

Just How Powerful Is Your Brain?

If the size of the world’s most powerful computer in the year 2000 were represented by the size of a two-storey house, what size building would represent the potential power of your own brain:

a) A miniature toy house?

b) A doll’s house?

c) A house the size of a normal room?

d) An apartment?

e) A normal two-storey house?

f) A mansion?

g) A palace?

h) A 100-storey skyscraper?

i) Bigger than all the above?

By now it should be becoming apparent to you that your average brain cell dwarfs the capacity of the average personal computer, and the answer is in fact i) ‘bigger than all the above’!

In fact, if we were to represent the strength and power of the world’s greatest super-computer by that two-storey house, the potential power of your own brain would be represented by a building far bigger than the 100-storey skyscraper. The strength and power of your own brain would be represented by a heaven-scraper 10 blocks square at the base and reaching to the moon!

Different Parts, Different Functions

Another key revelation in the history of the brain was our realization that different parts of the brain control different functions.

When the brain started to evolve over 500 million years ago, it developed simultaneously from bottom to top and from back to front.

The different parts of the brain

The human brain evolved in the following order:

The brain stem, which controls life-supporting functions such as breathing and heart rate.

The cerebellum, or hind brain, which controls movements of the body in space and stores memories for basic learned responses.

The limbic system, which is slightly more forward in position and includes the thalamus and basal ganglia – the mid-brain. The limbic system is critical for learning and short-term memory but also maintains homeostasis in the body (blood pressure, body temperature, and blood-sugar levels).

The cerebrum, or cerebral cortex, which covers the rest of the brain and is significantly forward in its position. The cerebrum is the universe’s evolutionary masterpiece and is responsible for a vast range of skills including memory, communication, decision making, and creativity. It is the flower of evolution, it is the latest part of the brain to develop, and it is the part that allows us to Mind Map. Mind Mapping is a function of evolution’s highest masterpiece.

In the next couple of pages you will follow the history of evolution’s development of the brain and our intelligence, culminating in the cerebellum and the brain’s ability to Mind Map.

The Brain Stem

Evolved: 500 million years ago.

Common title: Reptilian Brain or Primitive Brain.

Location: Deep down in the brain, extending up from your spinal cord.

Functions: Basic life support. Handles breathing and heart rate. Masterminds general level of alertness. Alerts you to important incoming sensory information. Controls temperature. Controls the digestive process. Relays information from the cerebellum.

Interesting fact: Recent research seems to be suggesting that this area of your brain may be far more ‘intelligent’ than we had previously thought.

Recent studies of the giant reptiles, such as alligators and crocodiles, whose entire brain is basically the brain stem, have shown that they have highly evolved forms of social behaviour, deep family and group relationships, and emotions.

Next time you see one of these giant reptiles, live or on film, look more closely to see the magnificent brain stem in action!

The Cerebellum

Evolved: Approximately 400 million years ago.

Common title: Little Brain or Hind Brain.

Location: Attached to the rear of the brain stem – part of the lower brain.

Function: Controls body position, poise, and balance. Monitors movement in space. Stores memories for basic learned responses. Transmits vital information via the brain stem to the brain.

Interesting fact: In the human brain, the cerebellum has more than tripled in size in the last one million years.

The Limbic System

Evolved: Between 300 and 200 million years ago.

Common title: Mammalian Brain or Mid-Brain.

Location: Between the brain stem and the cortex.

Function: Maintains blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, and blood-sugar levels. Governs navigational skills in the hippocampus. Critical to learning and for short-term and long-term memory, and stores memories of life experiences. Maintains homeostasis (constant environment) in the body. Involved in survival emotions of sexual desire or self-protection.

Interesting facts:

1 Scientist Robert Ornstein says: ‘One way to remember limbic functions is that they are the four ‘F’s of survival: feeding, fighting, fleeing and sexual reproduction.’

2 The limbic system contains the hypothalamus, often regarded as the most important part of the ‘mammalian brain’. It is often known as the ‘brain’ of the brain. Although tiny (about the size of half a sugar cube) and weighing only four grams, it regulates hormones, sexual desire, emotions, eating, drinking, body temperature, chemical balances, sleeping and waking, while at the same time masterminding the master gland of the brain, the pituitary.

3 The hippocampus is increasingly thought to be the seat of learning and memory. In shape it looks remarkably like a little seahorse.

Two other major areas of the mid-brain include the thalamus, which makes preliminary classifications of external information reaching the brain, and which relays information to the cortex via the hypothalamus. It is the hypothalamus that is the part of your brain which decides what comes to your attention and what does not – for example, telling you at which moment to notice that the room is getting warmer or that you are getting hungrier!

The basal ganglia, which are located on both sides of the limbic system (as is the cerebellum), are concerned with movement control, especially initiating movements. In the human brain (your brain) these networks have been growing larger and better developed over the last few million years.

The Cerebrum (Cerebral Cortex)

Evolved: Approximately 200 million years ago.

Common title: The left and right brain.

Location: Fits like a giant ‘thinking cap’ over the entire brain; extends into the full area of your forehead.

Functions: Organization. Memory. Understanding. Communication. Creativity. Mind Mapping! Decision making. Speech. Music. Other specific functions include the full range of the ‘left/right brain’ cortical skills discussed in The ‘Left and Right’ Brain.

Interesting facts:

1 Your cerebrum is by far the largest part of your brain.

2 The cerebrum is covered by that evolutionarily magical one-eighth-inch thick, amazingly corrugated layer of nerve cells known as the cerebral cortex. It is the nature of our particular cortex that identifies you as human.

3 The two cerebral hemispheres are connected by a fabulously intricate network of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum; these 300 million nerve fibres shuttle information back and forward between the two hemispheres.

DID YOU KNOW THAT…?

Since the beginning of time there have been over 90 billion humans born into this world, each one astoundingly different from all the others?

The human brain contains a million million neurons or nerve cells?

Brain cells are so tiny that you could fit 100 hundred of them onto a single pinhead?

Each of your brain cells is more powerful than a standard personal computer?

If you lined up all of your brain cells they could reach to the Moon and back? (The Moon is about 238,710 miles [384,000 km] from the Earth.)

The human brain can generate thousands of new brain cells every day?

The number of internal ‘maps of thought’ that the brain is capable of producing is 1 followed by 10.5 million kilometres of standard typewritten zeros?

To make a machine that could do everything you could do - to make another you - would cost well over a couple of billion dollars? You are highly valuable!

At the same time as you make mental connections in your thoughts you are making physical connections in your brain? You are literally making that incredible brain of yours more complex, more sophisticated, and more powerful with every thought connection. The brain with which you are reading this now is therefore not the same as it was yesterday, and it will not be the same tomorrow!

The ‘Left and Right’ Brain

The most important area of the brain to understand when it comes to tapping in to your brain power is the cerebrum or, as it is often referred to, the ‘left and right’ brain.

This is because the cerebrum controls all the major memory and learning skills that we rely on to make us shine as individuals; if we understand how to tap into the full power of the cerebrum we can strengthen our mental and physical performance in every area of our lives. What do we actually mean by the left and right sides of the brain?