128 | Can’t See the Forest? Let NotebookLM Draw You a Map

Image courtesy of ChatGPT 4o

NotebookLM and Its Role Among AI Tools

The AI landscape has exploded, bringing with it a flood of new tools. For anyone who deals with dense information—educators, researchers, nonprofit professionals, or just lifelong learners—this explosion is both a gift and a challenge. Sometimes, it’s easy to get lost in the trees while trying to understand the full forest of ideas. We have more ways than ever to sift through ideas, but the volume can be overwhelming.

Enter NotebookLM. Unlike general-purpose AI chatbots—like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—NotebookLM is designed specifically for working with your content. It’s what’s called a source-grounded tool, meaning it doesn’t just answer questions based on general knowledge scraped from the internet. Instead, it anchors its insights in the documents you upload. That could be PDFs, Google Docs, or any set of notes you're working with.

This approach is a big deal. In the AI world (and as highlighted in StrefaTECH often!), one of the most common issues is hallucination—when a chatbot/LLM invents facts or confidently misstates information. Because NotebookLM is source-grounded, its responses are far more reliable. You can click to view the citation for each insight, see where that point came from, and evaluate it for yourself. It’s like having a research assistant who always shows their work.

That makes NotebookLM a fantastic fit for anyone who needs to make sense of a large and varied collection of materials—summarizing, connecting, and analyzing information that would be difficult to fully grasp in a single sitting. If you've ever had a dozen tabs open and forgotten where you saw that perfect quote—or struggled to remember how two pieces of information relate—this is your moment.

Another bonus: it's a handy place to gather a set of source materials around a topic. You can return to that focused set later—continuing your exploration or using it as a reference hub—and even add new sources over time as your project or research grows.¹

Mind Maps: A Quick Refresher

So how does this all tie into the bigger picture of understanding information? That’s where mind maps come in.

Mind maps are a visual thinking tool that helps you lay out ideas in a tree. Instead of listing bullet points or typing up pages of notes, you start with a central concept and draw connections outward to related ideas. The main idea forms the trunk, and as you move outward, branches represent subtopics, each sprouting its own offshoots. It’s a visual forest of knowledge, and mind maps help you trace the paths from root to canopy.

This approach isn't new. Tony Buzan popularized mind mapping in the 1970s as a way to engage both sides of the brain—logical and creative. But while drawing mind maps on paper is intuitive, it's not always practical for large or evolving projects. That’s where digital mind-mapping tools like MindMeister, XMind, and Lucidchart come in. These platforms made it much easier to build, edit, and share maps interactively.

Now, imagine combining that concept with AI. Not only do you get a visual layout of your information, but the AI helps build it for you.

NotebookLM's Mind Map Feature: A New Way to Visualize

NotebookLM has taken a bold step: it builds mind maps automatically based on your source documents. You upload a set of documents into a notebook, and the AI generates a mind map highlighting the most salient topics and their connections. No manual input needed.

This is a breakthrough. Automatically generated mind maps mean less time structuring your content and more time exploring it. Each node represents a key idea or topic identified by the AI. These nodes aren’t just static labels—they’re clickable. Clicking on a node expands subtopics, shows you how they're connected to others, and reveals exact citations from your sources.

It’s an elegant solution to the problem of “where did I see that?” If you’ve ever written a report and then struggled to find the original phrasing or statistic you wanted to quote, this feature will feel like a superpower.

NotebookLM's mind map becomes a kind of interactive knowledge graph tailored to your content. You can use it to:

• Identify patterns across reports

• Clarify relationships between themes

• Drill into unfamiliar topics with context

• Find supporting evidence instantly

Example Use Case

Let’s say you’re part of a nonprofit coalition preparing a position paper on urban food insecurity. You’ve uploaded city reports, previous grant proposals, and data from community surveys. The mind map reveals central topics like "food deserts," "transportation barriers," and "school meal programs."

You click on "transportation barriers" and see subtopics like "bus route limitations" and "elderly access issues." Clicking further, you find excerpts from a city planning report that quantify bus frequency in affected areas. Right there in the map—without a keyword search or hours of scrolling—you’ve found what you need.

This isn’t just convenient. It’s transformational. You’re not just reading documents—you’re navigating them, exploring how they speak to each other, and drawing insights that might otherwise stay buried.

Tips and Observations

• Use high-quality sources. The better the documents, the smarter your map. Well-written reports, organized notes, and structured outlines yield the best results.

• Expect surprises. Sometimes the connections the AI surfaces aren’t ones you would have made—and that’s the point. Let yourself be surprised.

• Combine tools. The mind map isn’t a standalone gimmick. Use it alongside NotebookLM’s chat function to ask targeted questions, or the notebook summary to step back and review the big picture.

• Zoom in and out. Don’t just follow one path—pan across the map, explore tangents. This is where synthesis often happens.

Closing Thoughts

NotebookLM’s mind map feature is more than a shiny add-on—it’s a powerful lens for seeing your information in a new light. For anyone working across multiple sources, especially in research-heavy or mission-driven roles, this tool brings clarity and speed to your thinking.

It’s not about AI replacing your insight. It’s about AI helping you uncover it.

Try it out. See what unexpected links appear. Reconnect ideas you hadn’t thought to group together. And perhaps most of all, find that elusive quote without ever scrolling again. Let it help you to…

Make Good Choices!

1. Quick note — if you add sources from “live” info (e.g., webpages, Google Docs, YouTube videos), the initial source will be a snapshot of the materials. If the source has been updated since you added it, be sure to remove and re-add it to get the latest version. (Hopefully NotebookLM will evolve in the future to automatically update the source materials!)