Jerry's Brain
A live tour of Jerry's Brain — how connecting ideas over time unlocks insight and better decisions.
Abstract
Jerry Michalski will take you inside Jerry's Brain — his living, evolving knowledge space that he has been curating for decades. You'll see how linking ideas changes how we think, remember, and collaborate, and how visual structure helps reveal patterns, context, and opportunities. We'll explore how personal knowledge tools and trust-centric practices can make teams more resilient and innovative, and how you can apply these principles to your own visual thinking and note-making.
Jerry's been using his external Brain to catalog and examine what he's learned in the 27-plus years he has fed his one mind map. (You can get a sneak peek ahead into his talk by visiting this Thought and browsing around.) While Jerry's use of TheBrain is quite personal and idiosyncratic, you will likely find inspirations among his insights, as you build your own system to support your curiosity.
Speaker Bio
Jerry Michalski
Founder, Open Global Mind
Jerry Michalski (ma-CALL-ski) is the founder of Open Global Mind, a project to help humans make better decisions together. He is also an expert on trust.
Jerry was on the front lines of the tech revolution for a dozen years as a tech-industry trends analyst during the dot-com boom, as Managing Editor of Esther Dyson’s monthly newsletter, Release 1.0. He also advised corporate advanced-technology groups on whether and where to deploy exponential technologies like machine intelligence.
One of the 4,000-plus startups Jerry interviewed had a useful mind-mapping app called TheBrain. Intrigued, Jerry began curating his Brain then, over 27 years ago. Now it’s the world’s largest, with over 600,000 entries. You can consult that same Brain online, for free, here.
In the mid-90s, Jerry realized the word “consumer” was a linchpin to understanding many of today’s dilemmas. Following “consumer” led him to the concept of trust, specifically the many ways that consumer capitalism has broken trust. More optimistically, he also found groups around the world rediscovering trust to solve thorny problems.
From this mix of movements and ideas, Jerry is creating Design from Trust, a process that can be applied in many different domains. DfT’s home base is Open Global Mind.
Sample Speeches:
- Unfinished 2020: Trust Is the Only Way Forward (and its 2022 follow-on)
- Personal Democracy Forum 2018: Designing from Trust
- TEDxCopenhagen 2012: What If We Trusted You
- A hunch: Nobody's having the info curating experience I'm having
Find Jerry on:
Watch the Session
Session Summary
An in-depth exploration of his nearly 28-year-long relationship with The Brain software, a personal knowledge management (PKM) tool he uses to map and curate his entire intellectual life. Jerry's Brain currently contains over 620,000 “thoughts” (nodes) connected by more than 1.5 million links, all meticulously added by hand at a rate of 50–60 entries daily. This singular, ever-growing map, which he began in 1998, serves as the foundation for his key insights on memory, knowledge, and the future of collective intelligence.
Key Ideas and Philosophical Insights
Jerry's core philosophy, developed through decades of rigorous curation, centers on two major beliefs:
- The Amnesic Society: He posits that modern society suffers from a collective amnesia, lacking a reliable, shared place to store and contextualize links and memories. This state, he argues, makes the public “easy to spin.” His work aims to counteract this by building a durable, persistent memory layer that knowledge should accumulate and accrue over time, connecting new ideas back to original sources.
- The Extended Mind and Cyborg Status: Jerry views his integrated use of the software as having created an “extended mind” or “extended self,” positioning him as a kind of cyborg seamlessly integrated with the technology. This highlights the critical role of tools in supplementing human cognitive function; once the tool’s command structure is internalized, the user operates as a fusion of mind and machine.
For Jerry, the value of his tool lies in its ability to feel “infinite yet manageable” while maintaining a crucial sense of orientation—a guiding principle he likens to a diver’s maxim, “always trust the bubbles.” He is adamant that a person’s tool for thought must have low mental overhead and be instantly comfortable, as The Brain was for him.
The Challenge of Generative AI and Storytelling
Addressing the future of PKM, Jerry argues that Generative AI should not obsolete tools for thinking. He asserts that the work of actively processing and connecting information must pass through the user's wetware (neurons) to truly be known and understood. The future lies in a synergistic, collaborative Collective Intelligence, where human-curated knowledge meshes with new intelligences.
He identifies a major limitation of The Brain—and many PKM tools—as their inadequacy for storytelling. Built purely on text and links, it cannot replace presentation tools. He envisions new “power tools for storytelling” that can follow a narrative path while remaining dynamically connected to the underlying “nuggets,” or source materials, avoiding “inert” artifacts like static presentation PDFs.
The Big Fungus and the Future of PKM
Jerry is highly critical of the current PKM/PPM landscape, which he describes as a “huge field of silos.” To address this fragmentation, he is working on a concept called “The Big Fungus,” a metaphor for the shared infrastructure needed to bridge these separate systems. His vision calls for data to be separated from the tools in a “rich layer of soil,” allowing users to shift seamlessly between different representational schemes (like a Brain-style map, a Prezi path, or a Kumu visualization) while interacting with the same underlying data.
He believes AI, specifically protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), could act as the transducer necessary to translate and connect these different tools. This connectivity is essential for fostering productive, complex dialogue where groups can quickly identify points of agreement and focus deeply only on the remaining points of disagreement, leaving a persistent memory trail of the discussion.
Curation Style and Tool Use
- Conciseness: He is laconic, using short, succinct labels for thoughts, with long-form notes written outside the application.
- Color Coding: He uses minimal color, reserving Yellow for Facts and Purple for Opinions/Conclusions.
- Link Rot: He rarely deletes thoughts (believing “we never hear from the graveyard”), accepting link rot as a “fact of the web” and using the Wayback Machine feature to update dead links, preserving the historical context.