PersonalBrain For Mac: Work The Way You Think. Messy?

Does your Mac help you think better? Sure, Macs help us organize by storing and tracking information.

iCal reminds us. Address Book keeps contact information. Mail helps us to communicate with others. Safari brings us the internet world. But does your Mac help you think better than before you began using a Mac?

I want to say yes, but I’m not so sure humans learn to think better because of software on a computer.

What our Macs really do best is to save and retrieve information quickly and easily. We have more information available at our fingertips than ever, some of it brilliantly easily accessible, some not so much.

Having a Mac capture and display information should free our minds from mind numbing details, right?

Enter PersonalBrain, another application for computer users which helps us to organize whatever needs organizing, putting everything (almost) in one place for near instant retrieval.

Think of what flows across your Mac’s screen on a regular day. Email, files, contacts, documents, web pages, snippets, reminders, schedules, to-do lists, assignments, tasks, projects.

Sure, our Macs are great personal tools to help us, but the sheer volume of information we view and need to act on each day is dumbfounding. Dumb? Maybe we need another brain.

PersonalBrain captures and organizes almost all the information you view, touch, ignore, act upon, disdain, and fight with each day. PersonalBrain does one thing we seem to forget we need to do.

It helps to free the mind of clutter and commotion, of conflict and fear. How?

When you use PersonalBrain, Mac, Windows, or Linux, you get a single location, a simple interface which tags information with context and meaning, links associatively, and yet makes it easy to retrieve details what you’re not supposed to remember.

This accomplishes a few things of import. It helps you find information faster, reduces the problems associated with organizing folders and files, and filters irrelevant information which often gains mental weight just by being around awhile.

Face it. Mental clutter is a problem. Sometimes our computers are so complex, with so many applications and utilities and files and options, that it becomes part of the problem.

PersonalBrain helps by linking related information by topic, idea, project, and makes it much easier that OS X’s Spotlight to search through folders or files to get at the information you’ve saved.

It starts with a concept map. Think of it as mind mapping. Simply drag and drop files, snippets, information, web pages, whatever, into a single map.

After awhile you can start to see, via a visual representation of the information you store, how you think and organize. That’s the basis for improvement in the thinking process.

If Safari and Firefox bookmark web pages, what does our mind do with all the information we see on our Mac each day? We bookmark it but forget where the bookmark is. PersonalBrain becomes a kind of visual bookmark manager.

The Life Manager is like an easy to use but very huge file manager; a digital file cabinet. Mix and match bookmarks with files and ideas and you can see why you need a visual interface rather than a big list.

The trick is threefold—knowing what the information is, and what you want to do with it, and knowing where to put it. PersonalBrain captures, stores, and retrieves relevant information based upon your criteria.

Plan events, research a topic, dig up information for analysis, brainstorm, plan, present, even track your relationships with others in business with drag and drop simplicity.

PersonalBrain is an intuitive way to manage the thousands of disparate pieces of information that cross our eyeballs each day, but that we don’t always act on right away. It’s available for Mac users, Windows users, even Linux users, so it works well in a mixed company office environment.

Prices range from free for PersonalBrain 4 to $150 for Core, to $250 for Pro. Free to expensive. What’s not to love? The only major issue I found with PersonalBrain is, indeed, major—you still have to discipline yourself to act on information, store it, tag it, retrieve it, act on it again.

Get me a piece of software that will do that and $250 will be a cheap price to pay.