
How a mediaeval thinker out of the box: Stupor Mundi, helped me to solve a Chinese puzzle
Inspiration often comes from unlikely sources.

Inspiration often comes from unlikely sources.

The greatest literary mysteries are not always hidden in forgotten manuscripts. Sometimes they have been lying in plain sight for two thousand…

As Hiroshima vanished in the first atomic explosion of war, two Go masters calmly reset their scattered stones and continued their game.

Every complex machine comes with an instruction manual. Tony Buzan spent a lifetime asking why the most remarkable machine of all -…

From Darwin to Nietzsche, from giraffes to grandmasters, the battle for survival has shaped far more than the natural world.

Tony Buzan believed that no one is born unintelligent - only that too many minds are never given the opportunity to flourish.

Before computers conquered chess, one extraordinary mathematician proved that human intuition could still outthink silicon.

Conan Doyle's attitude to war seems, from the tenor of this passage, to be one of stoic acceptance, rather than enthusiastic celebration.

The greatest discoveries are often made not by choosing between science and the humanities, but by refusing to recognise the divide.

Great minds rarely conform. The golden age of chess produced champions whose brilliance was matched only by their colourful eccentricities.

Empires are conquered twice: first by armies, and then by the erasure of memory.

Some games determine kingdoms. Milton imagined one that determined the destiny of mankind.

Every generation believes it has discovered a better way to improve humanity. Inevitably, it begins by rewriting the rules.

Tony Buzan’s prime invention was the Mind Map.

Not every deadlock is a stalemate, and not every defeat is a checkmate. Chess teaches us the difference.

The greatest unexplored frontier is not outer space, but the twelve hundred grams of living matter between our ears.

The greatest revolution in learning did not begin with a computer. It began with a blank sheet of paper, a coloured pen,…

Speed reading was never about racing through books. It was about liberating the mind from inefficient habits.