Govt backing needed to benefit from mind mapping

He said many countries had provided opportunities for their students and citizens to learn mind mapping as an effective tool to help develop thinking and learning skills.

But in Thailand, where he has been promoting mind mapping for the past 12 years, the principle has not been successful because of improper application and a lack of support from the government, said Tanya - a licensed mind-mapping instructor as well as manager of the local Buzan Centre.

British-born Buzan, 67, is the author of more than 100 books. He is best known as a proponent of mind mapping and mental literacy, mainly involving memory and reading skills. He has taught people and students around the world how to maximise the use of their brain power.

In 2008, every teacher in Singapore - or 81,000 teachers - received training in how to use Buzan's mind maps. The project was supported by the Singapore government.

China' s government supported a TV documentary programme featuring Buzan's mind maps. According to Buzan, the programme was seen by an estimated 350 million people.

"I've found happiness among students using mind maps. We have many students who go from number one at the bottom to the top. We had a 15-year-old girl in Singapore who was at the bottom of science for the whole year. She learned how to use mind maps and she came from the bottom to top in one day ," he said.

Buzan is also working with a university that plans to teach every child and adult in Malaysia the art and science of thinking and mind mapping, so that all Malaysians can develop their cognitive skills by 2020.

Australia was the first country to apply mind maps to the education of autistic children, with impressive results. A high percentage of both school and university students in Australia use mind mapping as their prime thinking tool.

Thousands of head teachers in Scotland have learnt how to apply mind maps to improve their students' learning and thinking skills, and many other European countries have focused on training teachers .

In Thailand, the Education Min- istry put mind mapping into its curriculum for students in 1997, but none of its personnel were ever trained by him or Buzan, Tanya said.

"Teachers have only studied mind mapping from Buzan's books, but have not understood the basis of mind maps clearly. They have then taught their students to write mind maps and forced them to use them. This has caused a 50-per-cent reduction in the effectiveness of mind maps because students felt they are useless and boring," Tanya said.

He appealed to well-known and successful people in the Thai community who had used mind mapping - among them former deputy prime ministers Paiboon Wattanasiritham and MR Pridiyathorn Devakula - to help encourage the Education Ministry to seriously promote mind mapping.