This âguru of grey matterâ and award-winning poet recently arrived in Johannesburg fresh from the International Conference on Thinking in Malaysia, for a week of furious activity that would exhaust someone half his age, talking at universities, schools, businesses and launching a new book, Age- Proof Your Brain. Weâve lived through the Agricultural Age and Industrial Age, and are now in the Information Age, âalthough recently information workers have been elevated to knowledge workers,â says Buzan in his beautifully enunciated English, delivered with a twist of dry humour. He lays this at the feet of business leaders, who he says were primarily taught at business schools about making short-term profits, how to satisfy the short- term âneedsâ of their shareholders, how to make money fast and, inter alia, some marketing and basic management skills. Buzan, who has been described by The Times as âdoing for the brain what Stephen Hawking did for the universeâ, says that we use less than 1% of our brains, and that the number of patterns of thought possible for them is greater than the number of atoms in our galaxy and its 200-billion stars. Itâs a wonderful prospect â” weâll have a population of older, wiser geniuses because weâll have escaped from the Industrial and Information Ages into the Age of Intelligence, where we will all live a lot more happily and therefore a lot longer. Once theyâve learnt how to study, to read faster, communicate better and understood the workings of their brains, then they can be let loose on physics and geography and they will take only a quarter of the time they usually do to learn.

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