Moonwalking With Einstein (22 page)

“I don’t use the word ‘memory’ in my class because it’s a bad word in education,” says Matthews. “You make monkeys memorize, whereas education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can’t have higher-level learning—you can’t analyze—without retrieving information.” And you can’t retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between “learning” and “memorizing” is false, Matthews contends. You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.

“Memory needs to be taught as a skill in exactly the same way that flexibility and strength and stamina are taught to build up a person’s physical health and well being,” argues Buzan, who often sounds like an advocate of the old faculty psychology. “Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.

“The formal education system came out of the military, where the least educated and most educationally deprived people were sent into the army,” he says. “In order for them
not
to think, which is what you wanted them to do, they had to obey orders. Military training was extremely regimented and linear. You pounded the information into their brains and made them respond in a Pavlovian manner without thinking. Did it work? Yes. Did they enjoy the experience? No, they didn’t. When the industrial revolution came, soldiers were needed on the machines, and so the military approach to education was transferred into school. It worked. But it doesn’t work over the long term.”

Like many of Buzan’s pontifications, this one conceals a kernel of truth beneath an overlay of propaganda. Rote learning—the old “drill and kill” method that education reformers have spent the last century rebelling against—is surely as old as learning itself, but Buzan is right that the art of memory, once at the center of a classical education, had all but disappeared by the nineteenth century.

Buzan’s argument that schools have been teaching memory in entirely the wrong way deeply challenges reigning ideas in education, and is often couched in the language of revolution. In fact, though Buzan doesn’t seem to see it this way, his ideas are not revolutionary so much as deeply conservative. His goal is to turn the clock back to a time when a good memory still counted for something.

Pinning down Tony Buzan
for an interview is no easy task. He is on the road lecturing roughly nine months of the year, and boasts of having racked up enough frequent-flier miles to go to the moon and back eight times. What’s more, he seems to cultivate the sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that are a prerequisite for any self-respecting guru. When I finally corralled him behind a desk at the World Memory Championship to discuss the possibility of our sitting down for a couple hours, he opened a large three-ring binder and unfurled a colorful panoramic chart, perhaps three feet long. It was his calendar from the previous year, and it was filled with expansive, continuous blocks of travel—Spain, China, Mexico three times, Australia, America. There was one three-month period when he didn’t set foot in the United Kingdom. He told me that he absolutely didn’t have any time to speak with me for at least three or four weeks (by which time I would be back home in the United States), but he suggested I visit his estate halfway to Oxford on the river Thames and take some photographs while he was away.

I told him I didn’t see how I was likely to learn very much from an empty house.

“Oh, you’d learn quite a lot,” he said.

Eventually, through his assistant, I was able to fix an hour with Buzan in his limousine on his way home from the BBC studios in London, where he had just wrapped up a TV interview. I was told to go to a street corner in Whitehall and wait. “You won’t be able to miss Mr. Buzan’s car.”

There was, in fact, no missing it. The car, which pulled up about half an hour late, was a bright ivory 1930s taxicab that looked like it might have just been driven off a BBC set. The door flew open. “Step inside,” said Buzan, beckoning. “Welcome to my small, traveling, beautiful lounge.”

The first subject we spoke about, because I had to ask, was his unique wardrobe.

“I designed it myself,” he told me. He was wearing the same unusual dark navy suit with the large gold buttons that I’d seen him in at the U.S. championship months earlier. “I used to lecture in an offthe-peg suit, but I was tugging at it with my expansive gestures,” he told me. “So I studied fifteenth-, sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century swordfighters, and how their arms had not one iota of resistance from their wardrobes. Those ruffles and big sleeves weren’t just for show. They were for thrusting and parrying. I design my shirts so that I, too, am free to move.”

Everything about Buzan gives the strong impression of someone wanting to make a strong impression. He never swallows a syllable or slouches. His fingernails are as well cared for as the leather of his Italian shoes. There is always a pocket handkerchief tucked neatly in his breast pocket. He signs his letters “
Floreant Dendritae!
”—“May Your Brain Cells Flourish!”—and ends his phone messages “Tony Buzan, over and out!”

When I asked him about the source of his incredible self-confidence, he told me that he owes much of it to his extensive training in the martial arts. He has a black belt in aikido and is three quarters of his way to a black belt in karate. Sitting in the backseat of his limo, he demonstrated a series of jerky moves, a slice through the air, and a shadow punch. “The way I use these techniques is by not using them,” he said. “What’s the point of fighting if you know you can kill the other, i.e. human, or you can take out his eye, or rip out his tongue?”

Buzan is—he often found occasion to remind me—a modern Renaissance man: a student of dance (“ballroom, modern, jazz”), a composer (influences: “Philip Glass, Beethoven, Elgar”), an author of short stories about animals (under the nom de plume Mowgli, after the boy in
The Jungle Book
), a poet (his last collection,
Concordea
, consists entirely of poems written on and about his thirty-eight transatlantic flights aboard the supersonic Concorde), and a designer (not just of his wardrobe, but also of his home and much of the furniture in it).

About forty-five minutes outside of London, our ivory chariot pulled into Buzan’s estate on the river Thames. He asked that I not name its location in print. “Just call it
Wind in the Willows
territory.”

Inside his home, named the Gates of Dawn, we took off our shoes and tiptoed around a collection of drawings that had been laid out across the floor, part of an illustrated children’s book that he was working on “about a little boy who doesn’t do well in school, but does very well in his imagination.” There was a large television set with at least a hundred VHS tapes scattered about it, and a bookshelf in the foyer that held the complete
Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World
, several copies of the sci-fi thriller
Dune
, three copies of the Quran, a large quantity of books authored by Buzan, and not much else.

“Is this your library?” I asked.

“I’m only here three months of the year. I have libraries in several other places around the world,” he said.

Buzan revels in travel, and in being a man of the world. Once, when I asked him where he’s able to find the concentration to turn out two or three books a year, he told me that he has found serene spots to work on almost every continent. “In Australia at the Great Barrier Reef, I write. In Europe, wherever there are oceans, I write. In Mexico, I write. At the Great West Lake in China, I write.” Buzan has been traveling since he was a young boy. He was born in London in 1942, but moved with his brother and parents—his mother was a legal stenographer, his father an electrical engineer—to Vancouver at age eleven. He was, he says, “basically a normal kid, in normal trouble, in normal schools.”

“My best friend growing up was a boy named Barry,” Buzan recalled, sitting outside on his patio with his pink shirt unbuttoned and a pair of large, wraparound geriatric sunglasses protecting his eyes. “He was always in the 1-D classes, while I was in 1-A. One-A was for the bright kids, D for the dunces. But when we went out into nature, Barry could identify things by the way they flew over the horizon. Just from their flight patterns, he could distinguish between a red admiral, a painted thrush, and a blackbird, which are all very similar. So I knew he was a genius. And I got a top mark in an exam on nature, a perfect mark, answering questions like ‘Name two fish you can find living in an English stream.’ There are a hundred and three. But when I got back my perfect mark on the test, I suddenly realized that the kid sitting down the hall in the dunces’ class, my best friend, Barry, knew more than I knew—much more than I knew—in the subject in which I was supposedly number one. And therefore, he was number one, and I was not number one.

“And suddenly, I realized the system that I was in did not know what intelligence was, didn’t know how to identify smart and not smart. They called me the best, when I knew I wasn’t, and they called him the worst, when he was the best. I mean, there could be no more antipodal environment. So I began to question: What is intelligence? Who says? Who says you’re smart? Who says you’re not smart? And what do they mean by that?” Those questions, at least according to Buzan’s tidy personal narrative, dogged him until he got to college.

Buzan’s introduction to the art of memory, the moment that set his entire life on its present path, came, he explained, in the first minutes of his first class on the first day of his first year at the University of British Columbia. His English professor, a dour man “built like a very short wrestler with red tufts of hair on his otherwise bald head” walked into the class and proceeded, with his hands behind his back, to call out the roll of students perfectly. “Whenever someone was absent, he told off their name, their father’s name, their mother’s name, their date of birth, phone number, and address,” recalls Buzan. “And as soon as he’d done it, he looked at us with a sneer on his face. That was the beginning of my love affair with memory.”

After class, Buzan charged down the hall after his professor. “I said, ‘Professor, how did you do that?’ He turned to me and he said, ‘Son, I’m a genius.’ So I said, ‘Sir, that is obvious. But I still want to know how you did it.’ He simply said, ‘No.’ Every day we had English for the next three months, I tested him. I felt he had the Holy Grail, and he wouldn’t share it. He despised his students. He thought they were a waste of time. Then one day he said, ‘In the beginning of this miserable relationship between myself and yourselves, I demonstrated the exquisite power of human memory and none of you even noticed, so I’m now going to put on the board the code by which I managed to accomplish that extraordinary feat, and I am utterly convinced that none of you will even recognize the treasures put before you—these pearls before swine.’ He winked at me and he put up the code. It was the Major System. Suddenly, I realized I could memorize anything.”

Buzan left class that day in a trance. It occurred to him, for the first time, that he had not even the most basic idea about how the complicated machinery of his mind worked. And that seemed odd. If the simplest memory trick could dramatically increase the amount of information a person could remember, and nobody had bothered to teach him that trick until he was twenty years old, what else was there that he’d never learned?

“I went to the library and I said, ‘I want a book on how to use my brain.’ The librarian sent me to the medical section, and I came back and said, ‘I don’t want a book on how to operate
on
my brain. I want a book on how to operate it. Slightly different.’ She said, ‘Oh, there are no books on that.’ I thought, you get an operations manual on your car, your radio, your TV, but no operations manual on the human brain?” In search of something that might elucidate his professor’s feat of memory, Buzan found himself drawn to the library’s ancient history section, where his professor had suggested he might find some of the original ideas about improving memory. He began reading up on Greek and Roman mnemonics (in Buzan’s pronunciation, the M is not silent), and practicing the techniques in his spare time. It wasn’t long before he was using the
Ad Herennium
’s advice about loci and images to study for exams—even to memorize all his notes from entire courses.

After graduating from college, Buzan went on to work a collection of odd jobs in Canada, first as a farmer (“I thought I’d take that job just to have ‘shoveling shit’ at the top of my CV”), then in construction. In 1966, the same year that Frances Yates published
The Art of Memory
, the first major modern academic work to delve into the rich history of mnemonics, Buzan returned to London to become the editor of
Intelligence
, the international journal of Mensa, the high-IQ society, which he had joined in college. Around the same time, he was hired by the city to work as a substitute teacher at difficult inner-city schools in East London. “I was a special have-brain-will-travel teacher,” he says. “If a teacher got beaten up, I was the next one into that classroom.”

In most cases, Buzan had just a short amount of time with each of the classes he was subbing for, a few days at most, and hardly enough for even the most well-intentioned teacher to believe he could make any difference. In search of ways to help his troubled students, and perhaps rub off a bit of his own abundant self-confidence on them, Buzan turned to the old memory techniques he had first learned in college. “I would go into the classroom and ask the students whether they were stupid or not, because everyone had been calling them stupid, and sadly they believed they were stupid,” says Buzan. “They had been inculcated with the idea of their own incapacity. I said, ‘OK, let’s check it out,’ and I’d give them a memory test, which they’d fail. I’d say, ‘Seems you’re right about being stupid.’ Then I’d teach them a memory technique, and then I’d retest them, and they’d get twenty out of twenty. Then I’d basically say, ‘You told me you were stupid, you proved you were stupid, and then you just got a perfect score on a test.’ So I’d get them to question: What’s going on here? For some of the students who’d never gotten a perfect score on an exam, this was quite a revelation.”