MIND MAPPING FOR EDUCATION | Mayumbula Michael Chikwililwa | TEDxUniversityofNamibia

[Music] good morning ladies and gentlemen I'd like to begin my presentation with a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. who said that a child's education should begin at least 100 years before that child was born just the other day I was lounging relaxing in my room going through my Diaries and reminiscing about the go about the good old days and as I read through my Diaries I looked and I said my goodness I would I had so many dreams so much vigor so much passion and as I went through some photographs I came across this little gem right here of myself in primary school I'm the one giving the thumbs up I had a wonderful childhood it was beautiful but it made me ask the question what about the youth of today what are their hopes goals dreams and visions and how realistic is it going to be for them to make those dreams a reality now many of us have heard the phrase education is the greatest equalizer not so if that is the case ladies and gentlemen then we are in a situation of dire straits in 2008 the Ministry of Education conducted a study and what they did was they decided to follow a group of grade 8 learners for that year and the aim was to follow them academically until they got to grade 12 so in 2008 they started off with 56 thousand students fast forward to the next year and they only had 48 thousand students the year after that the number dropped down to 56,000 by the time these learners got to grade 12 the number was down to 15 to 20,000 that is the loss of about 40 35 to 40,000 students where are those children where are their hopes where are their goals where are their dreams if the results that the Ministry of Education released last year are anything to go by this group of learners that you're looking at right here if they were in metric right now only six of them would get the marks required to advance to a tertiary institution what happens to the rest of them who gets to decide who gets to live out their dreams within the realm of computer science so for those of us who use computers what typically happens is when we get stuck when a program becomes unresponsive we press ctrl Alt Delete and that helps us fix the problem I believe that right now at this present point in time our education system needs a reboot I don't believe that any one magic bullet will solve all our problems but I would like to propose something to you today that is entitled radiant thinking I believe that radiant thinking is one of the keys that will help our students perform better in high school and in school in general but before I can get to radiant thinking please allow me to give you guys a bit of a background because I believe that it is crucial that we understand the manner in which the mind works before we can have before we can fully appreciate radiant thinking each one of you sitting in this audience right now has a one trillion brain cells they look something like this and the name of the brain cell is a neuron traditionally speaking our children were categorized into Li the left brain or right brain groups those who belong to the left brain group were considered to be analytical and those who belong to the right brain with the right brain group were considered to be creative so what teachers would do was the following if you're intelligent you're good at maths you're good at science you fall into the left brain group and if you are the kind of student who is not so good with the books you get pushed to the creative section no you need to learn to work with more with your hands do more of the practical subjects not so but modern research has actually shown that that is a myth our brains will both left and right hemispheres work together as one in tandem no child should be limited into either a left or the right brain group now each and every one of us has several mental skills that we have these mental skills are as follows language number logic rhythm color imagery and spatial awareness so the question is how does our brain store information and the secret is in patterns when you take a sip of a glass of water that information is stored in your brain in the form of a pattern when you meet somebody in town you shake hands and you exchange names that information is stored in your brain in the form of a pattern when you're reminiscing about what happened in your favorite television episode last week that information that you're accessing is stored as a memory pattern this for example could be the memory pattern for a banana and that for milk for example each of the brain cells that you have in your brain connects to approximately 10,000 other brain cells next to it so how many possible combinations can one single brain cell have the answer ladies and gentlemen is 1 times 10 to the power 28 how big is this number that's how large it is that's just one brain cell what about the entire brain this is where it becomes interesting if I wrote down the number on a piece of paper okay and this number is used to signify the power of your brain the number that would represent the total number of possible combinations that your brain is capable of creating this paper would be 10.5 million kilometers long 10.5 million kilometers long just to express a number we don't even have a name for that number but let's put this in perspective the diameter of the earth is roughly what 40,000 kilometers this piece of paper would go around the earth 262 times no child ever deserves to be called stupid anymore ladies and gentlemen we have infinite mind power the distance from the earth to the moon is approximately 380,000 kilometers this paper would go to the moon and back approximately 27 times the next time somebody calls you stupid you should say to them I have infinite power do not limit my abilities based on your perceptions but if that's the case then the question is why are our children failing it is my belief and my contention that the reason for this ladies and gentlemen is the manner in which we feed information into the brains of our children this is typically how we teach our children to take notes you write down summaries and in some cases you'd also have some bullet points I showed you seven mental skills this does not cater to all of them did not does it there are issues with this form of note-taking key words are hidden it's difficult to remember it takes time to compile those notes your creativity is stifled and it doesn't cater to all seven of your mental skills dr. Keith Howe of Exeter University conducted a study and what he did was the following he took three groups of students and they were given material that they had to go and study and then they would be tested on that material and they were allowed to stand with their notes whilst they were answering questions the first group of students were given complete notes the second group were given sentences and the third group worked with key words whom do you think performed the best out of all of these groups hundred percent correct the those that use key words the worst performers were right down here the ones that used complete notes and you wonder why our kids are not performing in school this should give us food for thought there was another experiment that was conducted by dr. Ralph inhaler of harbor in 1970 that was published in the scientific magazine and in this experiment he showed participants 2,560 photographs so you would sit down and you would view a viewer photograph for 10 seconds then the next photograph would come and then the next photograph after the next 10 seconds it took three days to conduct this experiment at the end of the third day they gave them a one-hour break and then they called them back in now they wanted to test the memory of the recoil ability of the participants so to test them they showed them two photographs one which they have seen before and another which they had not seen before and they had to guess which one of the two photographs they had seen the results were astounding 85 to 95 percent of the participants got the pictures correct that was a success rate 85 to 95 percent they said no no no no this was too good to be true maybe we gave them too much time let's reduce the time from 10 seconds down to 1 second and the results ladies and gentlemen were completely identical 85 to 95 percent this is why we have the saying a picture speaks a thousand words and with this scientific experiment has shown is that as far as pictures are concerned our brains are actually limitless we have photographic memory one when it comes to pictures ladies and gentlemen I propose to you that the food of the mind based on my limited research is imagination and Association don't believe me take a look at this photo what do you think is happening over here so we are thinking oh it's an accident that is your creativity coming into play you haven't actually seen the accident taking place but your creativity is filling in the blocks the blanks what are these exactly most of you are saying gifts how do you know they're gifts technique seriously technically this could just be boxes that have been covered in nice paper with ribbons on them but because of association you associate boxes that look like this with gifts now let's have us a small experiment ladies gentlemen I'd like you to all close your eyes please close your eyes I'm going to mention a word and then we're going to see what happens I want you to focus on the word that I'm going to mention the secret word is mango mango hmm mango please open your eyes is this what you saw exactly this proves the point that our binds do not think in terms of words what most of you saw in your mind's eye was a nice juicy mango and for those of you who went even further what you saw was yourself enjoying this fruit this should remove any doubt ladies and gentlemen in your minds we think in terms of pictures now we're prepared to move on to radiant thinking radiant thinking was established by Tony Buzan in the 1970s whilst he was at university and radiant thinking is based on certain principles it's neuron shaped it stimulates the imagination promotes Association it helps to foster creativity and it helps improve your memory there are certain guidelines that you need to follow when you want to implement mind mapping and these are as follows you need to make use of as much color as possible make use of images basic ordering ideas and keywords next up I'd like to show you a very quick very brief example of how a student in school would actually go about the process of mind mapping let's take the subject geography so the first thing that the student would do is get a piece of paper and write draw an image something that symbolizes geography the next stage would be to go through the book and look at the different chapters those would now form your basic ordering ideas note that each of those arms has a different color and we only use in key words each chapter has got subsections and on top of this we also encourage the use of images as well mind mapping is brilliant for many situations in life not just school you can use this in business you can use this for problem-solving and just to prove that I practice what I preach this is the mind map that I used to prepare this presentation that I've just delivered for you today ladies and gentlemen we need to press ctrl alt delete' on our education system nothing will change unless we change things it's that simple when you look into the eyes of our learners your young brothers your young sisters your children when you listen to their dreams what a what role are you going to play to help ensure that they manage to fulfill their dreams if there's only one thing you take away from the presentation that I have delivered today let it be this go back and Google mind mapping and radiant thinking and I'd like to end off with a quote by Anatole France that says an education that does not cultivate the will is an education that deprives the mind [Music] [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 57,169

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Namibia, Education, Mental health, Mindfulness

Id: _bRmXUCG7W4

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017