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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.

For Tony Buzan mind maps are much more aligned with the way people naturally scan pages of text. Rather than reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom, as Western schools teach, people absorb the contents of pages in a more visual, non-linear way, according to Buzan. Thus, when they learn how to mind map, they are relating to material with their right brain. And when they do this, they may discover relationships between ideas that they had never recognized before.

Learning how to mind map can be accomplished in many ways, but Buzan aims to help people with the mind mapping application, “iMindMap,” which he released in 2006. He works constantly to promote these techniques, through all of his books and his own website, “Buzan World.” Although he has founded so many organizations that work on people’s memory and knowledge skills in other ways, he is likely always to be known as the most vocal voice of the twentieth century in promoting mind map techniques.