Buzan and Managing the Manager of Knowledge

I left about 15 minutes into the Tony Buzan talk (on Day 3 of the ICOT). Not because I wasn't impressed but because I had already been impressed with the same talk delivered two years back.

In 2007 at the Mind-Map Conference in Singapore, Buzan also talked about:

• The inadequacy of traditional school systems to assess the intelligence of students (hardly a new thought but certainly worth repeating)
  
  
• The importance of nurturing the mind, failing which paralysis and atrophy sets in (read: if you're NOT working out on a regular basis and/or if you're NOT consistently learning new things - why not?)
  
  
• The significance of images (as the universal language of mankind) and associations in understanding how the brain works, thus his brainchild, the mind-map

Buzan put the modern development of education and brain research into some perspective: The universe began 15 billion years ago, civilisation a 100,000, the traditional school system 150 and breakthroughts in brain research less than 20 years ago. A drop in a drop in a drop of space-time history. (I'm not sure how useful this piece of data is but it does at least have that 'ooh-ahh' effect).

We've come a long way from the industrial revolution to knowledge management to the management of the manager of knowledge i.e. the brain.