Тони Бьюзен - Mind Map Handbook

8. Go into an Art Shop and EXPLORE!

Find out where you might be able to take local art classes, browse through any interesting books or magazines and, most importantly of all, buy yourself a little sketchpad or notebook in which you can begin to jot down your creative ideas, especially in as many image forms as you can. In this way you will be following exactly in the footsteps of Edison and Leonardo!

9. Look!

If you have any doubt that you are a naturally Creative Genius, consider the following: run through the memories of every beautiful, magnificent, complex and extraordinary thing you have ever seen. If you are in a situation that is in any way interesting as you read this book now, look up and look around.

Because we use our eyes to see, and because reality is ‘out there’, when we look at things we tend to assume that it is simply out there and we are simply looking at it .

But if it were only ‘out there’, how would it ever get into our heads?

What actually happens is that your amazing eyes, with their 260 million light receivers, receive billions and billions of photons of light per second, all carrying images to you. Your eye then transmits these images down your optic nerve to the back of your brain, which then re- creates the entire external world inside your head.

In other words, for nearly every second of your waking life, the Master Artist in your Creative Brain has been painting perfect pictures of reality for you to admire. Every beautiful face, every snow-capped mountain range, every sunset and moonrise, every flower, every animal, every bird you have ever seen, you have perfectly re- created in your own brain.

You have already created and painted, my genius friend, billions of Masterpieces! Your hands simply want to join in the fun and create some more for you! Why don’t you let them?

Completed doodles

3.5

You The Creative Musician

Welcome to a chapter in which you will discover the reasons why the vast majority of the world’s population believe that they are not creatively musical, and cannot sing. You will learn lessons from those master musicians, the birds, and will discover that you have been playing at least two very complex musical instruments for most of your life, and that you have ‘created’ thousands of musical compositions! Not only that, but in your Creativity Workout, you will learn how to build on the amazing capabilities you have.

Why is it that, as with the concept of Creative Art, 95 per cent of people surveyed around the world stated that they ‘knew’ they were not truly musical, and that musicians, like artists, possess some magical gift given only to the rare few?

As with art, people had tried to create music, and felt that they had failed. But had they in actual fact failed? Or did they simply not know the secret of naturally creating music?

To get a better perspective on this, let’s look at how the birds do it!

How Birds Make Music

Let’s look again at how, at the beginning of the last century, an extraordinary young Japanese musician by the name of Suzuki became intrigued with the problem of how birds actually learnt to sing.

In Japan, millions of people had beautiful songbirds in their homes, and as such there was a great demand for them. Suzuki decided that one of the best places to study the development of bird song would be to visit one of the bird breeding houses where tens of thousands of songbird eggs were hatched into little chicks.

Suzuki found to his surprise that the little chicks did not ‘naturally’ sing. They listened to a ‘Master Singer’ songbird that had been specially placed in the breeding house by the breeders; after many hundreds of trials the chicks eventually learned to sing just like the Master Singer.

In other words, as with art and the artist, the little songbirds had learnt to sing not by some magical happenstance, but by copying the best, and practising for many thousands of times before they themselves achieved mastery.

Suzuki had discovered a truth that applies to all bird brains, all animal brains and all human brains: singing and creative music-making are learned skills that are achieved by copying and constant working towards perfection.

Armed with this new knowledge, let’s take a look back at the typical events that may have occurred when you (that Creative Musical Genius-in-the-making) were just starting out on your journey of creative musical development.

The Death of the Musician

Once again, imagine a time when you were a toddler.

It is a glorious spring day, and you are playing with your friends in a blossom-filled park dotted with sandpits, swings, climbing-frames and the like, and with people out walking their dogs, meeting friends and basking in the beauty of Spring.

The sheer beauty and exhilaration of the environment fills you with joy, and you and your friends rush about, experimenting with that fantastic musical instrument you are just beginning to discover: your voice. Each of you hits notes higher than any opera singer, finding how many ways you can produce each note, how long you can hold it, how loud you can make it and how much you can vary it.

In the middle of this super-operatic symphony of sound, in which the dogs have enthusiastically joined, your mum and dad, and your friends’ mums and dads, descend upon you and tell you not to shout, not to yell, not to scream and not to disturb other people. You learn that experimenting with your voice and exploring its extremes is bad and anti-social.

A little while later you are in your class and are so involved in your work that you spontaneously begin to hum and sing. You are immediately told to stop it, and to be silent while you work. You realize that music is to be disconnected from art, learning and productivity.

A few years later, with a growing fear about using your voice other than in the most controlled manner, you are tested in your music class. Standing in front of your class, you are subjected to a public examination. With your neck and throat muscles tensed, and your mouth dry from fear, you are asked to repeat a note played on the piano. You rasp an approximation. It is ‘noted’ that your pitch is not good, and that your voice is not up to the standard of a member of the school choir. As a result, whenever an important person visits the school, and the entire assembly has to sing the welcoming songs or hymns, you are told not to make a sound, but just to mouth the words!

Having had your musicality further restricted and crushed, you one day find yourself in the sanctuary of the bathroom, and while taking a shower you let loose with your favourite tune or song. From downstairs comes the ‘unkindest cut’ of all: the yell: ‘Will you please stop making that horrible noise!’ You learn that even those you love are offended by your music.

All these ‘objective proofs’ will by now have convinced you that you are not musical, cannot sing and should not pursue such activities further. You have become a creative leper – ‘unmusical’.

But is this really true? Are the proofs really proofs? Or is there overwhelming evidence to the contrary; evidence which already proves that you are a wonderfully creative and natural musician?

The Rebirth of the Musician

Despite all of the ‘proofs’ against your ability, in fact, musically you are a creative genius. What’s more, there is plenty of evidence for this!