Note:
Available (in German only at present) from the publisher Junfermann or from any good bookshop (ISDN: )
Here are two reviews of the book:
Rear book jacket:
What readers are presented with here is not a book, but rather an imaginative, creative and powerful seminar within a book jacket. The effect of this book is increased enormously, due to the precautionary measures taken by the author. Thus the book makes it perfectly clear that curling up in a comfortable chair and engrossing oneself in its pages is simply one form of reception, another is written participation through note-taking, mapping for yourself and mind sketching, and yet another form is taking an active mental journey – through BrainLand. This book allows its readers to get inside their own brains. By means of nineteen anchor points one is introduced to the most unexpected aspects of thinking - always metaphorically, so that there is still lots of room for independent brainwork. Almost in passing one notices the constant mind mapping practice, becomes increasingly aware of an explosive development in one’s thinking. The mental shift is not towards categorising, limiting, discarding, but rather towards transforming, enlarging, unfolding. It is not ‘re-’ nor is it ‘e-’ which awaits us here, but rather ‘explo-volution’, if - yes if - we don’t just read in a receptive way. Mind mapping, this simple brilliant thought philosophy for everyone – which has often been twisted and watered down – is given a new foundation in this book. This is mind mapping at its best. BrainLand succeeds in filling a gap in the market for a user-friendly teach-yourself book about mind mapping, which the author puts into context with other neuro-models such as NLP or mental training. BrainLand is an overall concept for learning and thinking in an organised chaos of factors and possibilities.
Publisher’s note
There is an unusual dramatic quality which runs through BrainLand. Maria Beyer shares with you, the reader, her varied and considerable experience, gained through years as a trainer of mind mapping. She trains you using the mind mapping exercises and offers a book within a book. It is at once confusingly logical and predictably jumpy: just like thinking à la mind mapping. Reality levels are constantly changing between outside time, book time and BrainLand time… At the end it is you, the reader, who has helped to create your own book!
‘The general chat about thought, mental evolution and coming possibilities, which we will have to fulfil in the future, are consciously presented in detail at the beginning of the book so that the reader may feel impatient to get on to the promised mind mapping training. ‘But because mind mapping is very easy to implement when one is familiar with the few simple rules and features, I felt bound to explain the metastructures of thinking and of mind mapping in detail, to question, to challenge … at the same time you have ample opportunity in the practical work to draw on your own knowledge and personal experiences. In the course of your ‘tour de brain’, the book will become more and more a strategic plan which you, the reader, (can) continue to weave and redesign in line with your own personal development.’
With her excellent book, fairly sparkling with creativity, Maria Beyer corrects the impression prevalent in recent years, that mind mapping is a ‘quaint technique for now and again’. The last few years have seen enormous developments in research into the brain. What we know today about the way our brain ticks, mind mapping has perfected as a technique, proving just how relevant and effective it is.
‘For a multitude of thoughts and thought processes, as Gerd Gerken calls today’s requirements for thinking in still-established schemes and categories, mind mapping is a largely untapped means of mind and brain styling. Mind mapping can help in achieving those things which the new brain culture requires: means and forms of expression which ‘freeze-frame’ or illustrate the many parallel, jumpy, but also paradoxical processes and results of a ‘processing moment’.
BrainLand is a seminar within a book jacket, presenting a methodology for creating, working and thinking which assumes a very contemporary, indeed very future-oriented, role. Readers of this book manage – almost playfully – to get inside their own brains. BrainLand is an overall concept for learning and thinking in organised-chaos of factors and possibilities. The ‘tour de brain’ is a journey which pays off in every respect.
The mind map from which the concept for this book developed:
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And this is the spontaneous impression of a ten-year-old after reading BrainLand:
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Offer
It is planned to establish a forum here in the spirit of BrainLand for interesting articles, ideas, concepts, methods, uses or experiences. The BrainLand Forum is envisaged as a venue and meeting-place for ‘Brainers’. Anyone who would like to participate is welcome to do so, either by link (reciprocal please) or by renting – for a very low price – a plot in BrainLand, that is by helping to create a website.
Spielraum Seminars by Christian Maier
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