MAYBE my brain's playing tricks on me, but I'm sure I've heard about mind-mapping before. ''I doubt it . . . this is a new concept, and I invented it,'' said author of The Mind Map Book, Tony Buzan, with the supreme confidence of a good salesman, when we met at his hotel this week.
Yet, somewhere in the phone book-thick files of notes given during trendy and expensive management courses that I attended back in the 80s, I am sure that there were organic map-style notes written with lots of arrows and coloured pens that were supposed to help with my business presentations and reports - and which in a lazy, embryonic sort of way, I still use as a journalist.
Mr Buzan professed to be offended when I volunteered those reminiscences, saying that his mind mapping was rather more advanced and scientific.
But actually there is nothing wrong, in the fickle world of management training and self-improvement, with pushing a method that is still around after at least seven years: it must have something going for it.
What Mr Buzan is proposing does have a new twist of course, or it wouldn't be worth a 300-page book with pictures costing $289.
His ''mind revolution'' involves, quite sensibly, looking at how the brain itself is structured - of millions of interconnecting points in a kind of complicated sponge - and surmising that linear note-taking and thought-organising is inappropriate.
