TheBrain - Mind Mapping Software, Brainstorming, GTD and Visual KM Software

The Creative Leadership Forum is constantly searching for creativity tools and techniques and this mindmapping software PersonalBrain 5 is the nicest piece we have seen for a while. Below is a review from the US edition of IT To-day and you can download a trail copy here

The average human brain weighs about three pounds. And a man's brain is, on average, around 100 grams heavier than a woman's, and relatively bigger even with the difference in body size factored in. You'd think that could be an argument in favour of the male gender in those rather silly 'battle of the sexes' type debates that occasionally pop up; "See, men are more intelligent!" But when you consider that Neanderthals had bigger brains than our contemporary versions, male and female, that argument rather falls down.

Anyway, that's enough of that; we'll close Wikipedia now, we promise. So, the brain: it's a funny old thing, full of neurons, synaptic whatsits, clever juice and all sorts of marvellous stuff that makes it work really well. If organs were cars, the brain would be a Ferrari, going from zero to sixty connections in the blink of an eye. Though ours might be more like a hearse, given that a considerable chunk of it is dead.

And the brain's vast neural network of connections is exactly what Personal Brain 5.5 models itself on. This is mind mapping, brain-storming software, featuring a spidery net of thought topics with lines connecting interrelated ones up. The user focuses on one active thought topic in the centre of the workspace, and can see all the related parent thoughts, child thoughts, sibling and "jump" thoughts.

Sounds confusing? It really isn't, although it's easier to explain with an example. Say you wanted to create a brain map of your life. Starting with your name in the middle, as the main parent thought, you'd create child thoughts for your friends and family, work and hobbies.

Under these would go their own child thoughts, so under friends would be the names of your pals. Jump thoughts are those which don't fit as a sub-category of a thought, but have some manner of relationship to it. Perhaps a location where you like to meet friends, say a favourite bar where you all play pool; which would also link across to the thought of pool, under hobbies.

As you enter more and more data, the brain map expands and you can navigate around it examining the various paths. The program smoothly animates the map as you travel around, so you can more clearly see the relationships between topics. It's really quite a clever visualisation method, which is particularly handy for more complex tasks than our example, such as getting a snappy overview of a complicated work project.

The interface is slick, too, and thoughts can be moved simply by dragging and dropping. Links to websites can be embedded just by dropping them straight from a browser into the brain map. Thoughts can be pinned at the top of the screen, in other words bookmarked, and a history at the foot of the workspace shows the thoughts you've recently browsed to.

The free version of the program has a reasonably basic feature set, and that's pretty much everything you can do with it. However, Personal Brain Free doesn't place any limits on your usage, such as capping the size of the brain map you want to create, and considering it comes for nothing it's an excellent little visualisation tool.

The Core edition of Personal Brain, which costs $150, adds the ability to drop files directly into your brain maps, image thumbnails you can embed in thoughts, and other handy extras such as printing capabilities. At $250, Personal Brain Pro adds even fancier bells such as in-line spell-checking, the ability to add multiple attachments to a single thought, integration with Outlook, and a built-in event calendar which reminds you when events are on the horizon.

At those prices the full versions really aren't cheap, but the serious business user will probably get plenty of mileage out of the extra features. The good thing is you actually get to try out all the Pro version's features with the first month of the free program, so you can get a clear idea of whether it would be worth the outlay or not.

And the brain's vast neural network of connections is exactly what Personal Brain 5.5 models itself on. This is mind mapping, brain-storming software, featuring a spidery net of thought topics with lines connecting interrelated ones up. The user focuses on one active thought topic in the centre of the workspace, and can see all the related parent thoughts, child thoughts, sibling and "jump" thoughts.

Sounds confusing? It really isn't, although it's easier to explain with an example. Say you wanted to create a brain map of your life. Starting with your name in the middle, as the main parent thought, you'd create child thoughts for your friends and family, work and hobbies.

Under these would go their own child thoughts, so under friends would be the names of your pals. Jump thoughts are those which don't fit as a sub-category of a thought, but have some manner of relationship to it. Perhaps a location where you like to meet friends, say a favourite bar where you all play pool; which would also link across to the thought of pool, under hobbies.

As you enter more and more data, the brain map expands and you can navigate around it examining the various paths. The program smoothly animates the map as you travel around, so you can more clearly see the relationships between topics. It's really quite a clever visualisation method, which is particularly handy for more complex tasks than our example, such as getting a snappy overview of a complicated work project.

The interface is slick, too, and thoughts can be moved simply by dragging and dropping. Links to websites can be embedded just by dropping them straight from a browser into the brain map. Thoughts can be pinned at the top of the screen, in other words bookmarked, and a history at the foot of the workspace shows the thoughts you've recently browsed to.

The free version of the program has a reasonably basic feature set, and that's pretty much everything you can do with it. However, Personal Brain Free doesn't place any limits on your usage, such as capping the size of the brain map you want to create, and considering it comes for nothing it's an excellent little visualisation tool.

The Core edition of Personal Brain, which costs $150, adds the ability to drop files directly into your brain maps, image thumbnails you can embed in thoughts, and other handy extras such as printing capabilities. At $250, Personal Brain Pro adds even fancier bells such as in-line spell-checking, the ability to add multiple attachments to a single thought, integration with Outlook, and a built-in event calendar which reminds you when events are on the horizon.

At those prices the full versions really aren't cheap, but the serious business user will probably get plenty of mileage out of the extra features. The good thing is you actually get to try out all the Pro version's features with the first month of the free program, so you can get a clear idea of whether it would be worth the outlay or not.