TheBrain 14 Review: Artificial Intelligence Meets Real Intelligence

TheBrain 14 Review

I have had a long relationship with TheBrain. I started using the visual organizing app in the 1990s while at Hughes Aircraft to help manage the complexity of IT programs—similar to the work I did for the TDRS program that resulted in early ISDN video conferencing between Greenbelt, MD and El Segundo, CA and the installation of the first transfer protocol (FTP) mechanism for deliverables, cutting out paper and last minute trips to FEDEX on a Friday afternoon (as well as the accompanying air and ground logistics associated with delivery).

In many ways, TheBrain defies description. It isn’t typical software that has a single purpose and, therefore, fits neatly in a category. It even challenges broad categories like Knowledge Management, to which it fits, but not without conceptual spillage on the way because it can also be a very tactical, practical tool for managing projects and deadlines. TheBrain can incorporate massive stores of data about medicine that become the touchstone for surgeons, but it can also be the tool that tracks holiday shopping.

I use TheBrain for managing hobbies. My Shakespeare brain or plex allows for an exploration of Shakespeare’s life, what little we know of it, through years and personal relations. It also captures key dates for the writing of poems and plays. I recently updated this brain to include audio and text for all the plays and poems. The Shakespeare brain stores the images I have collected, not just as a set of files, but in relationship to the works and events of his life. Bring up The Tempest, and the audio and text become immediately accessible, along with additional documentation such as illustrations.

As a scenario planner, I maintain long-range sets of scenarios for the future work and create custom scenarios for clients on everything from the future of money to the future of libraries. Those scenarios and all of their documentation exist in TheBrain as rich, interconnected ideas that not only make documenting and exploring the concepts easy but also offer a user interface to what was traditionally a collection of presentations and narrative documents. spreadsheets and presentation files. TheBrain places the entire scenario into a single location that can shift from presentation to research without opening new files or searching for the latest version of a document.

Beyond the core scenario planning documents, TheBrain also captures all of the artifacts to support the scenario narratives from web links to images—again, items that often get lost as individual objects when they get attached to a PowerPoint slide, for instance. TheBrain can store the PowerPoint slide along with its component links and images. Unlike PowerPoint, which limits its world to fixed frames, the attachments and references within TheBrian don’t have practical limits, which offers storytellers more room for content that will ultimately shape their plots and characters.

No other piece of software offers so much flexibility. Sure, you can probably say a spreadsheet can be transformed to track data and make lists, but a spreadsheet is two-dimensional. Its relationships are held to rows and columns. Sure, you can link spreadsheets for a multi-dimensional view, but tools for visualizing those links, let alone managing them, don’t exist. Relational databases can represent multi-dimensional relationships, but not with drag-and-drop simplicity.

TheBrain is an N-dimensional database. Any thought can be linked to any other thought. Links can receive unique identifiers that document the purpose of the link. There is simply no other software that does what TheBrain does. While tools like Notion and OneNote offer repositories and searchable spaces, the TheBrain’s unique visual interface delivers a much richer experience that doesn’t just store but inspires engagement and exploration.

With TheBrain 14, TheBrain takes its excellent content creation and management tool to the next level by allowing creators to engage with AI to generate content directly within brain structures and associated notes.

What’s New in TheBrain 14

TheBrain 14 includes a number of new features. Here is a summary:

• AI generation of thoughts, which must be accepted before being incorporated into a brain.
• AI writing tools which include note generation, summarization, rewriting, grammar and spell checking, expansion, auto-complete, action item extraction, and translation.
• Stand-alone search engine with deep indexing.
• Cross-brain search.
• A new browser for the Windows client.
• “Favorite” brains to make them instantly accessible.
• More customization, including the ability to set brain tab colors.
• Support for 78 languages (default to the OS language).
• Improved performance.
• Full REST API.

What we like

Pros

• Organize anything and everything
• A real personal database
• AI features overcome blank page syndrome
• Visual user interface
• The BrainBox

TheBrain 14 continues to be the best place to manually organize content of all types. I classify its thoughts and relationships as content. Outlines for ideas that sit and gestate for weeks, even years, can easily be discovered and returned to, augmented, expanded, and transformed.

For those who choose to live in TheBrain, personal information easily coexists with business information. The cross-brain search surfaces whatever ideas or artifacts need to be discovered. Some brains deserve their own spaces, but regardless of the file structure, TheBrain 14 will find search targets against one’s collection of brains.

TheBrain thoughts are not limited to simple text. They can contain dates for projects or personal to-dos. They can be tagged. They can be assigned icons and colors. All thoughts that share a tag can easily be revealed with one click. The TheBrain also supports Types, which brings an object-oriented feel to the tool and allows ideas to become instances of a class.

A library, for instance, could include books, magazines, collectibles, and other items. Books could include subtypes, such as poetry, business, philosophy, fiction, etc. As with tags, a single click can reveal all items of that type. Types and tags help bring structure beyond the direct relationships drawn between items. High priority tags, categories or thoughts can be pinned to the top of TheBrain windows for easy access.

With the inclusion of AI, TheBrain dips its toes into the potential of AI to generate content. The AI interface, represented by a chip icon with “AI” inside of it, offers the following new capabilities:

• Generation of structures and the automated attachment of child thoughts based on the AI’s findings.
• User control over what data is sent to the AI engine.
• Customization via private OpenAI API Keys, including model selection.

AI-powered textual features include:

• Note generation with parameter settings for word count and creativity. A context thought can be used for guiding the note’s content. The target language can also be selected.
• Summarization
• Rewriting selected text
• Spelling and grammar correction
• Auto-complete
• Extract action items
• Translation

What’s not new in TheBrain 14 is the BrainBox, a cross-platform plug-in that allows people to capture URLs as they browse for later incorporation into a brain. Some other tools do this, from InstaPaper to Microsoft’s OneNote, but none includes the representational power of TheBrain, which allows those captured URLs and their associated information to become part of a rich, cross-reference structure of knowledge. My research on any topic would not be as efficient and insightful without TheBrain.

What could be improved

Cons

• Note generation prompt should include a dialog box to craft the prompt
• Summaries should be at the top of the notes (or the placement should be selectable)
• No personal AI defaults (except for paying OpenAI customers)
• AI-generated content labeling

As the team at TheBrain knows, after decades of use, I always have notes, many of them wishes for the next version rather than features or bugs in the current version. However, when I do find a bug, which is rare, I report it promptly.

I have a couple of thoughts that I will share here.

First, the note generation should include a box for writing the prompt. Good prompts require crafting, including the addition of content. I often write long prompts. While the context of a brain can be used to inform the query, it is not the same as crafting a full prompt. It also suggests that thoughts become a type of prompt, which is an interesting idea, but I’m not sure I always want to engineer my prompt in TheBrain as a set of thoughts.

I have the same issue with brainstorming ideas. I would like to add more flavor to my prompt than TheBrain currently allows in its dialog box. If I’m suffering from “blank page syndrome,” I would rather ask a question than spend time creating a thought structure.

With that skepticism in mind, the use of thoughts for prompt engineering is a potentially powerful one. As I wrote in my piece on knowledge management and AI, prompts will need knowledge management. I think TheBrain’s nascent AI prompt feature could be taken to the next level by permitting any thought to be used for context.

Just as typing in TheBrain 14 produces a list of thoughts with the same words, the prompt dialog could do the same. This would allow TheBrain to act as a prompt repository. As it is, TheBrain adds AI-generated content to the existing thoughts in the prompt source.

I see TheBrain as a tool posed to turn prompts into metadata. Linking prompts to results, along with other metadata, like the model, guardrails in play, would allow people to reuse and refine prompts. This could become a very powerful use case for TheBrain.

Once a creator accepts an AI-generated response, the audit trail and the possibility of refining the original prompt get lost. Note generation uses thought structures to generate ideas, but even with a deep structure, I found the generated note, at least on the topic of prompt engineering which I used in my tests, underwhelming. This is more likely a reflection on ChatGPT than TheBrain, but unlike the text interface, TheBrain doesn’t support prompt refinement well, but all the pieces are in place in this early partnership between TheBrain and AI to deliver a unique approach to prompt management that others will have a difficult time matching.

The current implementation of AI-based thought structure generation, while useful, is restrained, perhaps cautiously so, given some of generative AI’s foibles. However, the extension of greater context and context management should not unleash generative AI’s inconsistencies but rather improve upon its ability to offer more precise answers. The next version of TheBrain, perhaps a point release, could easily refine the AI interface by using thoughts in TheBrain more inclusively to drive content generation.

On a more mundane topic, summaries appear at the bottom of the text, but they would be better placed at the top. I would be OK with a user choice at the time of generation as to where the summary should be placed.

Being able to see personal AI defaults would be useful. Setting the default creativity level and word count would be useful, as I usually keep generative AI on a short leash. Others may not. ChatGPT also allows for the storage of content in an account that it uses each time to get closer to the prompter’s voice. It would be very powerful for TheBrain to store some prototypical guidance content on each user that can be fed into note-generation prompts to offer a more personalized and targeted response.

I would also like to see AI-generated content labeling. Notes, summaries, and other text could be preceded by “Generated by ChatG 3.5 Turbo” or something like that. Further, tagging thoughts generated by AI with an “AI-generated” tag could be a great feature not just for transparency but for knowledge management and collaboration. Those using a brain would be able to see, with a single click, all of the ideas generated by AI. It would also help customers see, in a very visceral and visual way, how their investment in AI is paying out.

TheBrain 14: The bottom line

TheBrain 14 retains all of the powerful features that have made TheBrain my go-to app for knowledge organization since it first shipped. Probably the only go-to app that has survived from the 1990s save for Microsoft’s Office suite. The inclusion of AI adds another dimension to TheBrain’s already multi-dimensional capabilities. A little refinement and I think TheBrain could become a leader in prompt engineering knowledge management alongside its ability to manage most other types of knowledge.

TheBrain provided the TheBrain 14 for review. Images courtesy of TheBrain unless otherwise noted.

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