Mental literacy, or learning how to learn, will become part of the Scottish core curriculum by 2005 predicts one of its main proponents, the educational writer and theorist Tony Buzan.

The originator of “mind mapping” and author of more than 70 books on how the brain learns, he says: “By the end of next year mental literacy, or learning how to learn, will be launched in Scotland, and I hope and believe it will be available to all Scottish schools by 2005.”

Buzan is to hold a one-day national conference on “How to Learn” at the University of Strathclyde on November 20 with the backing of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, Learning and Teaching Scotland, the Scottish Further Education Unit and the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde under the auspices of Tapestry, a new Glasgow-based agency run by former primary headteacher Katrina Bowes.

“This is a partnership where everyone is following the same educational vision,” says Buzan, who is committed to visiting Scotland over the next 10 years to promote his learning techniques “as a core part of the curriculum”.

He says: “Mental literacy will take its place alongside standard literacy and numeracy. You can teach a child the fundamentals in the equivalent of two weeks full-time over one or two years.

“You devote one or two hours at the beginning of every week on how to take notes, how to think creatively, how to remember data, how to prepare an essay or how to study texts.

“When you teach pupils that you save time because they learn more and they learn smarter, better and quicker.”

Buzan began researching memory and creative thinking in the early Seventies and first received national coverage with his 1974 BBC series Use Your Head.

Memory and creativity, he says, depend on “the two main pillars” of association and imagination. His mind-maps substitute a multi-coloured, strongly visual web of associations with arrow links and boxes (or, more accurately, blobs) for what he calls “traditional linear monochrome note-taking”. He defines the mind maps as “the external visualisation of thought”.

Giving the example of Scotland, you would put your image of Scotland centre-page with themes (associations) in coloured blobs at the end of the lines radiating from the central image.

Each blob is an associated category: history, culture, geography, industry, politics; and each category is subdivided into further associated blobs (culture: music, art, theatre), (music: folk music, classical, opera).

The blobs link to each other and to the central image or idea. Within half-an-hour the pupil has enough material for a 5,000-word essay, says Mr Buzan.

“Why take linear notes for a subject which is not linear? And why only one colour? Monochrome, like monotone, equals boring. It switches the brain off. You switch the pupil’s brain off and then blame them for not learning.

Buzan likes to talk in terms of multiple intelligences: “Planet earth tests us in different ways. Social intelligence is a major intelligence. But there’s also personal and physical intelligence as well as sensual, ethical and spatial intelligence.”

Teaching pupils how the brain works and how to use it will lead not only to higher achievement and higher self-esteem, but will make them happier and better-rounded human beings. Learning faster and better will give them more free time, more time to be themselves, he argues, with a side-swipe at the current vogue for “hot-housing”.

“Hot-housing - which means cramming the mind with more data and reducing pupils’ cultural and physical activities in the name of academic success - really means crushing their souls. Hot-housing is ramming more of the incorrect data down their throats.”

He says his experiences in schools around the world suggest that stress among pupils from as young as five is “endemic”, and he believes education in the last 30 years has worked against the efforts of creative and imaginative teachers because it is “too test-driven, too exam-driven”.

Although Buzan works as a consultant to large multi-nationals like IBM and BP and is the author of books on how to sell, he bemoans the “return on investment” principles which some American states have tried to introduce into education.

“A number of US states were in the process of eliminating all free and playtime because it wasn’t productive. It didn’t give ROI.”

Buzan’s interest in how to learn was stimulated, he says, while working in London schools in the early Seventies with children who were then labelled “learning disabled” or “delinquent”.

It turned out that none of them were really delinquent, and his methods received their first accolade, he says, when one pupil declared: “I wasn’t learning-disabled at all, I was learning-deprived.”

He claims his approach will not only make pupils better and happier learners, but will also make teachers’ jobs easier and more productive.

“Yes,” he says, “it will make teachers happier.”