Henrik Hammer

As a longtime "tools for thought" user, I'd seen a lot of mind maps, but I'd never been a big believer. But in one inspired weekend of prototyping, @HcwXd completely changed my mind. Mind Maps are now available to all @NotebookLM users. Here's why they're different... The problem I'd always had with mind maps really came down to two things: they were complicated to build manually, and once you'd assembled them, they weren't all that useful. Like, it was nice to see a diagram of the core concepts in whatever material you were mapping, but once you had that visualization, there wasn't really a next step that helped you explore any of those concepts. But about four months ago, shortly after he joined the Notebook team, @HcwXd built a mind maps prototype in his spare time. It eliminated the laborious process of manually creating links or tagging with concepts, and just generated an interactive map of all your sources automatically. That was amazing enough. But the thing that really blew me away was this: every node in the map launched a full NotebookLM query with one click. So you can get an amazing visualization of the core ideas or themes in your sources, but then instantly drill down to get a detailed overview of a specific topic, with citations back to the original source material. It's a genuinely new way to navigate through a large body of information. The best way to try it out is to create a new notebook, and add the last 20 or so documents you've written or read recently (PDFs/Docs/Slides/etc.) Then generate a mind map -- you'll have an amazing visualization of where your head has been for the past few weeks.