TONY BUZAN - brain principle number 1 - synergy

For thousands of years humans had thought that their thinking processes were organized on a simple, additive mathematical principle - every time you added a single new piece of data or new thought into the brain's computer, it simply added one more item to the store.

In the second half of the 20th century, however, we discovered that this was not the case, and in fact the brain operates synergetically. In a synergetic system the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; in other word 1 + 1 will equal more than 2. In such a system, "more" can reach Infinity.

Some of the first evidence for this came from Roger Sperry's work on the left and right brain, which won him a Nobel Prize, and which suggested that the brain was a multiplying mechanism rather than an adding machine.

How can this be so? A simple example from everyday human activity will suffice: daydreaming! When you are daydreaming (which everyone does, every day!) you are engaging not in additive thinking behavior, but in multiplying, synergetic thinking.

For example, you will take yourself ("one") and someone else (another "one") and you will start to multiply your thoughts. Depending on the other "one" of your choice, you can daydream about yourself and that other "one" all day, all week, all month, all year, or, as some people do, all your lifetime! You can use the intinite theater of your imagination, and its infinite props, to create the most macabre and spine-chilling horror stories and tragedies, or the most glorious and uplifting comedies, romances, fairytales and epics. The productions of Hitchcock and Spielberg have nothing on your imagination.

From research such as Sperry's, from examples such as daydreaming, and from many other sources , we can confidently state that the potential for the human brain (your brain) to generate thought is , theoretically, infinite.