Expand Your Mind

TheBrain not only aids in organizing your thoughts but could also stimulate new ideas and connections.
April 12, 2004

When you chat with someone who says, "My brain right this minute is 105 megabytes and there are 52,365 thoughts in there," you can (a) run a mile, or (b) figure you're talking to someone who might have something useful to say and stick around. Luckily I chose the latter.

Jerry Michalski is clearly a brainy guy. But in this case he's talking about his Personal Brain, a file built with organizing software called TheBrain (www.thebrain.com). In fact, Jerry's Personal Brain is so big that the company that makes the software had to build a special version when he reached, with 32,767 thoughts, the limits of the program. The founder of the company and inventor of the software, Harlan Hugh, hadn't expected someone to build such a big brain. "I've been using it so much, and for so long, that I got more thoughts than he counted on," says Jerry.

I'm a huge fan of graphical ways of displaying and organizing information, but I'd initially baulked at TheBrain because it takes a slightly different tack. Whereas most visual displays of data soar above the information, putting everything into perspective, TheBrain works by placing whatever bit you're interested in at the center of the display (the "thought"), showing only the links and thoughts close to it. TheBrain, in short, tries to imitate your brain, in the way that it focuses on the matter in hand, and couldn't care less about all the big-picture stuff.

Of course, visual mind maps are not for everyone. Some people swear by them as a way to organize data, brainstorm, or just save their Internet bookmarks. Others prefer to organize themselves by lists, their calendar, even their e-mail inbox. As Jerry himself acknowledges of TheBrain, "It's not for everyone. People have different cognitive abilities." The key, he says, is to "give people tools that match their style" so that, first, they have a way to arrange stuff, and secondly, to express them to other people.

And this, perhaps, is where TheBrain has an edge. It starts with a thought -- a little box in the centre of the screen -- which you can turn into more or less anything you like -- a file, a Web page, a link to a Web page, a term ("mind maps"), an idea ("mind maps are cool"), an umbrella term ("cool ideas that don't always work"). You can then link to it -- you can add a thought that follows it ("a child thought," in the lingo) or a thought that comes before it ("a parent"). This is a kind of hierarchy which lends itself to organizing your computer files, your Web links or your CD collection.

But then TheBrain takes a leap. If you click on a thought, it will come to the center of the window. Suddenly everything else moves into position around it. This is similar to the way your brain focuses on a problem, say the issue of mind maps, bringing it to the fore and forgetting, for the moment, anything but the thoughts directly connected to it (world hunger takes a back seat, mind maps' connection to subway maps comes to the fore).

And here, Jerry says, is where the value of TheBrain really kicks in: Making links to other bits and pieces -- what are called jumps -- that you didn't see a connection with before. Jerry, for example, found himself creating a jump between two separate business-oriented thoughts: vicious circles and virtuous circles. "In business, I realized, one person's vicious circle is another person's virtuous circle. This hadn't dawned on me before, because we tend to think of these things in isolation."

Jerry, of course, is an extreme case. With a brain as big as his, both in his head and in his computer, TheBrain becomes a memory bank, a repository of information and ideas that he can browse as a way to remind himself of things and to stimulate fresh ideas and connections. But it needn't be that flashy: You could just as easily use it as a better way to store Internet bookmarks; TheBrain lets you drag the link directly from your browser, creating a new thought in the process.

Starting that way might help you find out whether TheBrain is for you (there's a free month-long trial, then it costs $80). The trick is to give in to it entirely for as long as you're testing it, throwing everything you can in there. Like me, you might start to see better inside your own brain