Using AI to start a mind map

When I work with people to help them generate ideas, they often start by writing things down in a list in a word document. This method is a form of linear thinking, which isn't always the best way to explore a problem. I think it's best to play with the problem in your mind and mind maps make that easier because they transform your thinking from one dimension to two dimensions. And maybe in the future, we can even use VR to open up a third dimension of thought processes. Mind maps are especially useful for mapping out the topic that you're working on as they can help you identify gaps, underserved areas, or interesting connections. This prompt provides a mind map in the form of a bullet point list with indented sub bullets. If you're already using visual mind mapping software, you might be able to import this list and view it as a visual representation. So let's input an area that I'm familiar with and see what ChatGPT generates for us. So we'll paste our prompt in here and you'll be glad to see it's a nice short one this time. "You are an expert at creating mind maps, breaking down topics into their constituent parts and sub-parts. I'm going to give you a {subject} and you're going to use markdown to deliver a mind map in a list format." Okay. The subject, I'll put in something I'm pretty familiar with here. History of the electric guitar. Let's see what it comes up with. Okay. That's pretty good. You could see that that would fill out a mind map pretty quickly. You can see here, like we've got our main node and then beyond that, we've got sub nodes and then sub-sub nodes. So it's doing a really good job here. Now, we could take any of these and let's see the evolution here and let's ask it to expand on this. Can you please expand further on -- whoops, let's spell expand correctly, on the node -- well, let's see -- on the evolution node. Wow. It's really gone for it. That's really expanded on that. That's absolutely wonderful. So as you can see, this could be really, really powerful. Just to help you understand a topic, understand an area, see if you've got any knowledge gaps, or to see if there's any possibilities and gaps in there. So you can do this for any topic and I recommend you give it a go and maybe you can take this and import it into an actual piece of mind mapping software and get the proper mind map experience. A good mind map will help you understand exactly where you are when you're working on a problem. And with the help of ChatGPT, it's really more like a mindset nav because who actually uses maps these days? It's not 1986 anymore.