Careful, it might be gory! Lets do something kinda fun, and possibly interesting. Those who have known me for a while know that I’m a bit of a geek. Part of my geekiness has been surrounded by data: raw data, databases, ways to display and analyze data; collecting information of all sorts, and, trying to organize it. So indulge me in a reprieve from the usual drag of whatever you do, and let’s have a bit of fun with information and how to digest it.
And for me “data” is just information whether it be in bits and bytes, numbers, dollars, words, thoughts, concepts, or any other modality by which people do whatever they do, deal with one another, and communicate.
That is a quite disparate collection. How do you organize that in your brain. Well, I don’t know for the rest of you but the brain in thing on top of my shoulders can’t do it by itself. So I’ve always sought ways of doing that. I use Evernote on a daily basis. I’ve used various wikis. I’ve programmed my own databases in Microsoft Access. And more.
But the ability to VISUALIZE what you have collected in non-digital forms is important, at least it was to me. That turned me to mind-maps, and there’s a bunch of them. But the best I found is TheBrain and it is way more than what a mindmap can do. Here is a teaser of what it can do. Below is a link to a demo portion of my actual brain. There are over 9,000 individual thoughts (or nodes) but I have set some of them to be publicly viewable. What you will see is the highest level of the hierarchies. You can imagine how far it might drill down. Click on the Reference & Research tab or the Affiliations tab to see a small example of the “drill down” that is possible.
You will see a page that has two components (left and right on the page):
This is the visual area. Clicking on any node will make it ‘active’ and if you saw the full brain, you would then see the ‘child’ thoughts.
On the right side you will see the contents area with notes, web links, embedded documents, etc. These panels will be side-by-side and you can drag the vertical bar to resize them.
What you will see in my demo brain represents:
- 9,618 thoughts
- 11,970 links
- 3,018 notes
- 5,671 internal files
- 1,457 web links
Click here to access the demo brain. And after you have had a little fun with that, go to Jerry’s online brain to see one that will blow your mind. Almost 300,000 thoughts curated over 20 years and it contains a lot of real substance. For some background, he has a blog here.
See, I told you it would be fun.
