In Tony Buzan’s breakthough book ‘Age-Proof Your Brain’ the vital issues of the ageing workforce and the important questions it raises are addressed directly.
This is not a book of theory or simple observation. In it Tony provides practical methods anyone can use to sharpen their mind. The book offers a 7 Day Get Sharp Plan, backed up with a 7 Week Stay Sharp Plan.
Tony shows that anyone can sharpen their mind, and significantly improve their level of creativity, problem solving abilities and contribute to the success of their organisation.
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Overview...
10 years younger in just 8 weeks – the mental workout that will turn back the clock for your memory and brainpower
Memory and age – it’s the law of diminishing returns. As the years roll on, memory rolls up, slopes off and tucks itself away in a cobwebby cerebral recess. But now there’s hope for those of us caught up in an endless round of trying to remember where we left our car keys or the TV’s remote.
Before memory finally packs its bags and leaves, grab a copy of a great new book - Age-proof Your Brain - by the top ‘Guru of the Grey Matter’ Tony Buzan, inventor of Mind Maps® and leading international business consultant. Just an hour a day of Buzan’s revolutionary mind-stimulating workout will slough off the fug of age… and leave your brain in sparkling form!
It’s normally no fun growing old. As if it’s not bad enough that your knees creak and you can’t read the newspaper unless you hold it at arm’s length – then your memory starts to go. Quite subtly at first, of course. You walk to another room for something and by the time you get there, you forget what you came for. Names become elusive; household objects are just never where you thought you left them; you peel vegetables for supper, keep the peelings and throw out the veg – and the peeler. Eventually, you resign yourself to life membership of the CRAFT club – ‘Can’t Remember a Flaming Thing’ – and blame every lapse in memory on your advancing years.
CIRCUIT TRAINING - FOR THE BRAIN
But is it really age that’s at fault? Yes and no, according to Tony Buzan, inventor of the mighty Mind-Map, founder of the World Memory Championships, co-founder of The Brain Trust and proponent of the theory that most of us use less than 1% of our brain power. His brilliant new book Age-proof Your Brain revolutionises thinking about the link between mental acuity and age.
On the one hand, there is absolutely no substance to the generally held belief that the human brain necessarily deteriorates with age. Quite the opposite, in fact. The brain’s unique capacity to carry on forming new synapses (connections between the brain’s 100 billion+ neurons that are the key to memory and mental sharpness) remains undiminished over time.
On the other is the fact that most adults, even those slaves to the gym who wouldn’t dream of missing a regular physical workout, don’t take much ‘mental exercise’. Senior moments are more to do with absent mindedness than absent memory. The sharpest brains in the world are not necessarily young, but they will always belong to the people who continue to hone their mental functions throughout life – through mentally taxing work, learning new skills, or refusing to give in to false and negative beliefs about ageing.
Children spend all their waking hours in a state of enhanced mental activity as they absorb and learn about everything around them. By contrast, much adult activity is done on ‘autopilot’, giving the brain very little that’s new to work on. Consider the mental power it took to learn to drive or to cook a meal, yet the process very quickly becomes automatic.
What is crucial is to give the brain plenty of practice – mental flips, whirls and intellectual skirmishes that get and keep it functioning at its peak for concentration, memory, creativity… and logic.
IMPROVING CONCENTRATION AND MEMORY
This is exactly what Tony’s unique 7 day ‘Get Sharp Plan’ and the 7 week ‘Stay Sharp Plan’ - revealed in Age-proof Your Brain - aim to achieve. All that is required of your valuable time is an hour a day for a week to ‘get the juices flowing’ and bring the brain up to working fitness… then a once-a-week build up of more challenging tasks that will help make mind-stretching tests and games a way of life – for life.
The backdrop to both plans is Tony Buzan’s renowned memory techniques, starting with the ingenious Mind Map. Mind Maps have, for 30 years, helped business executives, teachers, students and many others – both at work and at play - to create brilliant ideas, easily grasp complex topics, achieve goals, motivate themselves and – crucially – strategise their concentration and improve their memory. The Mind Map is a one-person, paper-based ‘brainstorm’ - with the potential to unfetter jaded imaginations and unleash the brain’s real power.
There are many other memory improvement techniques to master – such as identifying patterns in data, or dividing it into bite-size chunks, and ‘tagging’ – that is, creating visual stimuli, perhaps weaving them into one long story, and relating or ‘tagging’ them to names and faces, or a list of words for later recall. Mnemonics, acronyms, rhymes and place association have their place too.
Tony Buzan recommends learning all the different techniques: ‘One great advantage of all these methods is that the more you use them, the more reliable your memory becomes, thus improving your mental powers as you progress through life.’
UNDERSTANDING CONCEPTS AND THINKING CREATIVELY
Once the techniques are mastered, you are ready to start improving basic brain fitness with the ‘Get Sharp Plan’. This plan focuses on challenging the brain, forcing it to build new connections. Quick-fire, timed memory games, logic puzzles, analysis, word play and creative thinking are all part of the daily routine, as is 15 minutes of deep relaxation – as vital to the mental makeover as the brain stretching exercises.
At day 6 of the ‘Get Sharp Plan’, the task is wholly creative and mind-expanding. On day 7, it is time to self-analyse and check progress. Then improvements can still be made (and weak spots ironed out) in the next phase – the 7 week ‘Stay Sharp Plan’.
Now physical exercise, diet and stress-reduction also come into play. Tony Buzan offers sound advice to keep your new healthy mind in a healthy body. Then the real fun starts – weekly sessions of varying duration, each focusing on a particular area of memory or mind-sharpening skill.
REMEMBERING FACTS AND FIGURES - WITH EASE
Tony believes that the 7-day ‘Get Sharp’ limber up and a good grasp of the ‘Stay Sharp’ techniques he outlines will turn a good brain into the equivalent of an athlete all set to train for the Olympics. The tasks described throughout the Study Skills Handbook are all about toning the memory – short and long term; episodic, procedural and sensory – improving concentration and focus, developing logical and spatial skills, thinking critically and sharpening creative powers.
Eight weeks on, and your brain will be razor sharp and those ‘senior moments’ a thing of the past. You will feel 10 years younger – at least, your mind will, and you may also notice physical benefits too. Above all, the power that was once on the verge of becoming dormant will have been unleashed – with wonderful, creative, mind-boosting results. Suddenly, getting that bit older may well seem as much fun as it was to be young.
About Tony Buzan
“Tony Buzan will do for the brain what
Stephen Hawking did for the universe.” The Times
As a young boy Tony Buzan was assured by his teachers that he couldn’t improve his reading speed. That made no sense to him. Surely if he could improve his physical fitness through exercise, he could do the same for his mental agility. As we now know, he was more than right. The quest for maximising the potential of his mind has led to the development of the world’s most powerful learning tools.
To help Tony Buzan achieve this, he has written over 90 top-selling books (sold in around 150 countries and translated into over 30 languages), and has appeared on numerous TV and Radio programmes for the BBC, ITV, CNN and many satellite channels. He’s the founder of the World Memory Championships and the World Speed Reading Championships, and in 1994 he was named alongside Mikhail Gorbachev and Henry Kissinger as one of five top international lecturers.
Visit www.buzan.com.au
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