Organizing Your Brain

Don't you wish you had a map of where you stored everything in your brain? Of course it would connect all your random synapse ramblings into a cohesive whole. And you'd be able to access the stuff you needed without slogging through unnecessary information. Well, you can download it today. For free.

The Brain is a website that claims "visual information management". You download their mind-mapping software, and start organizing your own brain.

A blurb from their site: "Simply type in your ideas. Drag and drop files and web pages. Any idea can be linked to anything else. Using your digital Brain is like cruising through a Web of your thinking. See new relationships. Discover connections. Go from the big picture of everything to a specific detail in seconds. Accelerate your mind."

Besides the obvious business applications, this program would be excellent for novelists and freelance writers to gather and view the multiple (and seemingly multiplying) bits of information that we spend so much time gathering.

Think about all your notes on the characters in your book. Many novelists call this a "character bible". When you add pages of notes on your character's appearance, skills, their history, relationships, likes and dislikes, there's a lot to look at. And that's only scratching the surface. A program like The Brain can organize it all into one place, and connect important points--like the fact that your female lead rescues orphans for a living mainly because she was abandoned by her mother.

If you're a freelance writer, The Brain can help you organize the information you find in the course of research on a particular topic. You may find some connections you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

Like many free online programs, you can upgrade the software for a fee, but if you'd rather not, you can keep using it for free. It works for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Definitely worth a try.