Episode 80: Notebook LM: A Tool to Support Executive Functions

Below you can view or listen to Episode 80 of The Personal Brain Trainer Podcast.

In this episode of 'The Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast,' hosts Darius Namdaran and Dr. Erica Warren explore into the power of habits and innovative tools for enhancing executive function and learning. They discussed the formation and benefits of habits, especially for individuals with dyslexia and ADHD, and introduce iVVi, a groundbreaking app for visual note-taking. The episode also covers key strategies like utilizing visual and auditory cues, balancing structured routines with creativity, and employing the 'Four Ts' - Techniques, Technology, Time, and Together - to simplify and enrich the learning process.

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Transcript

Erica: Welcome to the Executive Function Brain trainer podcast. I'm Dr. Erica Warren.

Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran. And we're your hosts, sponsored by Ivy. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. Well, try ivvi for free now at ah, Ivy App. That's ivvi.

Erica: sponsored by the Executive Functions Coaching and Study Strategies Certification course. A comprehensive training for educators, coaches and parents. Hey Darius, how's it going?

Darius: Doing well, doing well. So you're excited this week you've introduced the topic this week and it's an AI topic. So it's normally me that does the AI topics. What do you want to talk about?

Erica: I want to talk about Notebook LM. I'm so excited. And if you're wondering what LM stands for, it stands for language Model. It's a new Google. I guess it's not that new. You told me that it's actually been around for a year. But it obviously has some new features because I can see that part of or many of the features that I'm pretty stoked about are in beta mode. So maybe I'll even introduce you to something that you haven't discovered yet, which would be amazing because you are like all over AI. But yeah, it's like a, A, smart notebook. So you can create these little notebooks. You could do it for example, for a student. I'll give it a student example. You could create a notebook for a class, or you could do it for a unit or for a test. And it's just a place where you can grab all of these resources and throw them into the notebook. And it can be anything from a PowerPoint presentation. What I discovered is it doesn't take yet that is Microsoft Word documents. But if you save it as a PDF, it will take it. It will take websites, it will take YouTube, URLs, it will take documents, PDFs, Google Docs, just even your own notes. Or you can copy and paste things directly into it, articles, whatever you want. And it saves it all in one place. And it's just got me so excited. I think it's just an amazing new resource and we are going to be going through all the features and how it impacts executive functions. And I'm also going to bring in the ways of processing because it's really good for helping people to process things in a way that's more comfortable for them because it has such a wide variety of ways that you can reprocess the information and you know A little bit about this, right?

Darius: Yeah. I've been keeping an eye on NotebookLM for the last year and a half, watching lots of YouTube videos on it, and it's just grown and grown quietly. It's kind of like one of these hidden secrets in the AI world. It's incredibly powerful. Google's not spending a lot of time promoting it or anything like that, like ChatGPT or anything like that. But YouTubers are very, very excited about NoteBookLM. Students are very excited about NoteBookLM.

Erica: Yeah, I was just actually this week I was working with a number of students and introduced it, and one was working on a paper, and they were so excited. Another one was studying for midterms, and they were blown away. So let's jump in and start to explore the different features first.

Darius: I think probably from a listener point of view, if you're an informed listener, you'll be thinking, yeah, well, what's the big deal? I can do similar things with projects within Anthropic. I can do the similar thing with ChatGPT. I can create a project in that, with different files and so on and search all of those. I think that the killer feature is this a spoiler is the podcast element of NotebookLM that just blows everything else out the water in comparison.

Erica: That's one of them. And I was going to save that for last because I'm so excited about it and I'm not going to go fully into that yet because I kind of want to walk them through the steps of how to do it.

Darius: Before you go how to do it. I think it's maybe quite helpful to spend a little bit of why you're going to do it. What's the why? What's the real benefit? What's the big takeaway from using NotebookLM compared to just, I don't know, not using AI in this context.

Erica: You, know, it's funny because one of my students, she's a college student, she's like, don't show me another thing. She said, I've got my system, I'm really not interested, Erica. And I said, I swear I would not mess with your system if I didn't think it was necessary. Just give me five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, she was blown away. so it's

00:05:00

Erica: just an incredible way to be able to organize quickly, to access information fast, to have everything in one place, to be able to just do super quick searches or even asking questions for it, to search for you, creating study guides, being able to reprocess things in ways that work better for you. So if you don't like to have to read visually a lot of content, it can turn it into auditory content, it can turn it into sequential content, it can turn it into the big picture. It just really enables you to set it up in a way that allows you to process the way that you process and to take all that information and it manages the overwhelm, I feel like. And.

Darius: Yeah, and, it becomes very specific to the content there, you know, often. And AI is quite general, but when you're putting it into those documents and that context of those specific documents, it's just really intelligently reading through that context and that's it. Very specific.

Erica: That's right. That's right. The other thing is that it just becomes this hub for a particular topic, and it can handle more content than anything else that I've seen.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: You could throw in three YouTube videos, a book, a PDF book, and your notes from class and your slides from your teacher. And it can just handle all of that within one notebook. And then you can then, search for quotes or resources. And it's great because when it comes up, it'll bring up what you're looking for, and then if you click on the little number next to it, it will allow you to then find that information directly in the article.

Darius: So it properly references the article it's taken a summary from, and then it.

Erica: Takes you back to the article and shows you where it found.

Darius: Fantastic. That is really good. Yeah.

Erica: So, I mean, this is getting into the features.

Darius: Yeah, yeah. But it's good to know the why. The why of, of using this is like you've got a project on the go. Like you're writing an essay, or you're going to be doing an exam, or you're going to be writing an important blog post or an important report, or you're going to write, do a podcast, or you're going to do a marketing campaign or something like that. You basically get everything and everyone, as it were, into one room, one space. And this AI sort of digested all of it. And it's like, what do you want? How do you want it? Let's talk about this. And you've got like a partner to work with very spec context.

Erica: You can even add audio, you can even add your own notes, your own verbal notes. So say you had a meeting, and you were a little zoned out during the meeting.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: But you had an audio of the meeting. It doesn't even have to be transcribed. It'll transcribe it for you. So yeah, it just takes all of this diverse content, pulls it together and then allows you to dip into that pool in a way that's comfortable for you. You can ask questions verbally or in writing and it will answer it for you, but then it also will organize it, it will create timelines, it will create FAQs, it will create study materials, M, it will create questions, it'll create definitions, it just does whatever you want it to do. But it has kind of these set little areas that you can go to access or to kind of reprocess.

Darius: The information that would be really useful with writing an essay. I imagine I was just going through this with my daughter. Like if you pulled in the PDF of all of the lectures and the books and even if you scan them in and you put them in, often you can't remember where you did the quote or maybe you want to go back to the quote, and you've got a richer understanding of it. So you want to sort of define it a bit better or read around it a little bit more and so on. Yeah, yeah, fascinating.

Erica: And you could throw in the rubric.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: So the actual assignment.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: And so then you can ask after you've written the essay, you could throw the essay and say, did it answer all the questions in the rubric?

Darius: I like, you know, the closest I've come to what you're describing, and I've been meaning to use NotebookLM for months now. But again, I'm a bit like that student where it's just like not another AI tool that I have to learn and start adding more information to and trying to fight this scattered nature of using Claude for that and OpenAI for that and Perplexity for this and Ivy for that and so on. And it's like there's just only so many tools you can use at once. But I'm very tempted by NotebookLM. But I did an application form for. You know

00:10:00

Darius: how sometimes you can have a very big application form for a submission for grant funding or an award or something like that, a lot of in-depth questions and so forth. So I took relevant information and PDFs, and I put the rubric in and the questions in and everything was in one place. And then I could really answer those questions very accurately with really targeted, not generic AI type answers, but very specific. and it was very satisfying finishing an application for an award that I did it in a day when I think normally it would be like a two-week process and probably like four or five working Days throughout it. It would be exhausting, tiring, et cetera. But nailed it within the day. I couldn't believe what I could achieve.

Erica: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty cool. And you know, even with something like Notebook AI, I've been exploring it for a week, and I know that there are all sorts of other little gems in there, but I have to say, the platform, it reminds me of Google. Keep.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Keep was so easy to learn, so intuitive.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: And it's the same thing. It's so easy to learn. It's so intuitive, it's clean. You just go and you can create a notebook. And that notebook can be whatever you choose it to be.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: I haven't tried this yet, but supposedly you can combine notebooks.

Darius: Great.

Erica: But yeah, it's just so that's the first thing you see is just like an empty thing and you hit the plus sign of, yes, I want to create a new notebook.

Darius: Okay, so you've got, a big project, something chunky you want to get your head around, and you put all the relevant information in here. And what did it do that other stuff isn't doing well?

Erica: Okay. It could be a project, it could be a paper, it could be a test, it could be just your life, A, to do list. I mean, it can be so many different things, but yes. So you throw it all in there, and these are the types of things that you can do. First of all, it has a centralized, organized workspace that allows you to create each one of these notebooks. And then once you click on the notebook, there are these different things that it can do. First thing it will do is it'll give you an actionable summary so that it summarizes everything that you have put in there. So it, it converts this kind of dense information into some, something very clear, whether it is a to do list or actionable steps or key takeaways or summary. And you can interact with that, and it will even give you suggested questions. So you can ask it questions verbally or in writing, and it will kind of process with you.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: And in that way, it gives you these insights, but you can then brainstorm with it, which is so interesting. So it, it gives you that ability to kind of process out loud or process in writing. It gives you the options of what's best for you. Is it easier for you to type? Is it easier for you to speak? And is it better for you to have a dialogue? It allows you to do all of those things. The quick search blows my mind because how many times Are you looking for a quote in a book?

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: Or. And you don't even know, like, I'm looking for something that shows maybe a theme.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: can you find this theme somewhere in the book? Or can you find a quote that illustrates this idea?

Darius: Oh, that sounds nice. You know, actually searching a smart search rather than just a keyword search.

Erica: So then it brings up all the quotes, and then it gives you these little numbers, and if you click on it, it takes you back to the source and highlights exactly where in the source it was found. So if you had to also let the teacher know, for example, what page of the PDF you found, the quote, it's right there at your fingertips. Just takes so much pain out of it. But sometimes you're looking for something and you have to. When you're doing a regular find Right. Command F, you have to give it the exact words.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Now you don't.

Darius: And sometimes that's one of the things that I find with dyslexia. you know, often you don't know the exact word. The other day I was asking, I heard this whole thing about the deer population in America getting this disease, and I was like, oh, okay, Chachi pt. What's that? The name of that disease that sounds a bit like CVS and, you know, it's for deer and. And they die of it, you know, and it goes, oh, you mean CWS, which is

00:15:00

Darius: chronic weakening syndrome, and. And blah, blah, blah, blah. And you go, oh, yeah, that's what it is. Whereas if I put it into Google or whatever, it would like, no search or something completely random or pharmacies or whatever, because it's. It's. It's searching within a context. Love it. Oh, that would be so lovely. I would like that. Okay, I'm, I'm really excited already. What's next?

Erica: Darius, thank you for saying that, too, because I would say the aspect of dyslexia that trips me up the most is word finding.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: I am just. Me and my mother were like the thingamajigger and the doohickey over in that place, and we knew exactly what we were talking about, but nobody else did. And throughout my days, I get frustrated by that exact thing. And this is going to help so much. I mean, granted, you have to put the information in for, it, to search for it, so it's a little bit different. But as you gain more and more content, you know, that's going to be really helpful. And the bottom line is that's the way the AI is going. So for all of you guys that have word finding problems like me, where I'm like, oh, my God, I know that. I know the name of this thing. And I can tell you it's three syllables, and it starts with an M. Yes.

Darius: And it's. And it sounds like Philippa, you know, and it's like, yeah, all right, okay. That's enough context. I can figure that out.

Erica: But then what I have to do is I have to go through the Alphabet sometimes. You know, like, if I can't think of the first letter, if I have to think of someone's name, I'll go through the Alphabet and, oh, it's. I get to T. And I'm like, oh, right, Thomas.

Darius: Right.

Erica: You know? but anyway, it's just going to take that pain. It's just. It's. I love how all of the AI is really leveling the playing field for people that have these processing challenges. And I guess that is a processing challenge. I guess all these learning disabilities have a processing challenge component, and these things can really support us and level the playing field. The other thing is the audio overview. So it can give you an audit if you just don't want to have to read. Will give you auditory.

Darius: Does it just read out what it.

Erica: Sort of, I don't know. I haven't explored that fully yet.

Darius: Okay, right.

Erica: But it will offer the spoken summary. So I'm assuming that it just will read the summaries out loud to you.

Darius: What's the study Guide generator creator like? I mean, sometimes they're a bit gimmicky. What's it like?

Erica: It's so fun. It's so fun. So, yeah, you just hit a little button, says study Guide creator. And it takes a moment. And then what it does is it pops up with questions, possible test questions, and then it gives you the answers, and then it defines terms throughout it. So. And I'm sure that's going to change over time. So if you wanted to create index cards, you could then write them out.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: So, the nice thing is it's not doing too much for you. So you still have to interact with the content. But because Quizlet now has an AI feature, you could take the study guide that it created and the. The vocabulary, you could drop it into Quizlet AI, and it will create a Quizlet for you.

Darius: Okay. Yeah. So, by the way, talking about all of these things, can you keep taking notes as you're going along? Is it kind of building up the note as you're going along? Is that the idea?

Erica: Well, you know, it's interesting because it does allow you to take your own notes. So technically you could do this for a class. I suppose you could just create a note for each class. You could type it in.

Darius: When you say for each class, you mean like for each lesson or do you mean for each kind of class as in we are Studying Human Biology 101 for the next 10 weeks, you.

Erica: Could do however you want. You could create a notebook for each class. You could create a notebook, meaning that for geometry I have a notebook. Or you could decide to break it into units or for particular tests. So you can do it, I think, in, in many different ways. It’s how and that, that's what I like about it. It allows you to choose what works best for you.

Darius: You've got to tell us about the podcast feature now. Go on.

Erica: Well, I'm going to take you to the timeline feature next.

Darius: Oh, okay. Right, right.

Erica: That's been really interesting because sometimes I'm like, how are they going to turn this into a timeline? And it does. It can turn it into deadlines, like the order of deadlines. It can turn it into milestones, it can turn into schedules. I had a student that was studying for his history midterm. It was so cool and created this wonderful timeline, sequenced timeline so that it was easy. And for the sequential learners, fantastic.

Darius: So, so fantastic. For the

00:20:00

Darius: non sequential learners who sometimes need to get a bit sequential for specific things, like I just need to see this in the right order especially. It's really useful to have a timeline. Is it a visual timeline or is it just like a, a bullet list? A bullet list timeline.

Erica: okay, Carlin. But it's, it's really nice and I'm always surprised how it's able to do that. It's funny, when I first tested it out, I created a notebook on NotebookLM and create found all this content, YouTube videos, very clever. It was everything. And put it in there and then asked it questions about itself and then. Yeah, it was pretty cool. Next one FAQ generator. I know I'm streaming this out for the best for last. So if you just want basic FAQs, it will automatically extract what it thinks would be frequently asked questions and then we'll answer them. Okay. All right. Drum roll.

Darius: Drumroll.

Erica: We're going to the interactive podcast. Notice I said interactive. Did you know about that new feature?

Darius: I do, yes.

Erica: Okay. All right. So this is what completely blew my mind. It will take. You just hit a little blue button that says generate and it will take all the content and everything that you've processed and reprocessed and maybe even spoken to about with the AI and it turns it into a podcast. And at first, I was like, oh, how good could this be? The voices will blow you away. They are the best voices I've ever heard. There's a male voice and a female voice. And what's fun about it is they make it super casual. They use uhs and ums, which is really funny because it makes it sound so real. They interrupt each other at times, they speak over each other. It sounds like a real podcast, but the, the sound quality of their voices are outstanding. And now they have this new beta feature. So once the podcast comes out, so say you didn't do the reading for class and you're driving to your college and you've got half an hour, you could just download it and listen to it on the way. And you could listen to a podcast riffing about the article that you didn't read. And that's what the new beta feature is, is you can ask it a question. So all of a sudden, if you hit that button, the podcast stops. And one of the people in the podcast says, oh, we've got a listener that has a question. And then you can auditorily ask your question. And then they riff about that before they get back to the podcast. So that you have this way of interacting with these experts on the content. And they're experts on just what you gave them. But what really freaked me out was when I did this with one of my students who was doing the history midterm and we were interacting with it on the podcast and I said, oh, let's ask them to come up with a memory strategy.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: And let's see what happens. And these two AI male woman hosts; they riffed for like five minutes on different memory strategies that you could use. And they were outstanding. They were great. So they're obviously not just limited to the content that you give them. There's a whole intellect behind that where they're able to pull from other information, other content. But I was so impressed with their knowledge of memory strategies and the breadth of the different types of memory strategies that they were riffing on.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: And it just made me so excited.

Darius: Yes. I think it's important for listeners to understand that when you're talking about podcasts, it's like a micro podcast, it's like seven minutes long or 10 minute long or 15 minutes long.

Erica: Not necessarily. Yes. A 90-minute podcast.

Darius: Did they ask for? Did they ask for? No. To be that long?

Erica: no. So I think it depends, and maybe that's new. And I think maybe you could even ask it.

Darius: I think you might be able to ask it to do shorter or longer.

Erica: But the ones that are a midterm. That makes sense.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: If you've got that much content in there, it's going to be a longer.

Darius: Yes. And what's really impressive about what they're doing is... They come in and go, hey, we're. We're talking about this topic of Human Biology 101. It's really fascinating, studying the dynamics of behavioral evolution and the physical world and so on. And the woman's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing how they use that analogy of the monkeys coming in down to the river and so on.

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Darius: And do you remember that? And. Oh, yeah, yeah, that was, And they're. They're talking through something, and then they start using analogies and explanations, and they bring in interesting facts. And it is very much like two people who have just discovered a new bit of information and they're just talking through it themselves. So two intelligent people just learned some new information and are, you know, discussing it and explaining it to one another. It's that vibe, isn't it?

Erica: It is. And the emotion behind it. The excitement.

Darius: That excitement, yeah.

Erica: And how they're able to pull out little details. Like, did you pay attention to this little detail?

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Love about it is that AI doesn't miss any of the details. Like, we might. So even if you read the article and then you listen to the podcast, you might have these constant pause like, oh, wow, I didn't make that connection. Or you might even. Maybe you pulled something out of it that they didn't say. And then you can bring that up and ask something, well, what about this?

Darius: What about this, Erica, that might blow your mind is I saw someone on YouTube and what they did was they put in all their own content from their YouTube and their website and written documents and so on, put their own content in. Like Erica Warren content. Okay. And then the podcasters were having a conversation, and then you connect into the podcast, and you say to them, hi, I'm actually Erica Warren, the author of the content. And the podcasters start speaking to you differently. They go, oh, my goodness, we've got a listener. The listener who's just called in is the actual author of the content that we're talking about here. What can you tell us about it? and. And what thoughts? And you go, well, I thought the way you talked about executive Function and dyslexia. You maybe talk too much about the reading side of things, but dyslexia is a lot more than just reading. It's about processing. And they're kind of like, oh, gosh, yes, we should talk more about the whole processing side. And so sometimes you can correct some of its sort of default biases or, worldview on certain topics that are maybe a little bit too shallow and.

Erica: Guide them, but it also guides you because maybe you know this stuff, but you haven't realized that you haven't fully processed it. Like there are all sorts of things that you and I have as an expertise and we kind of think we've said it, but we didn't go deep enough into it, whatever. So yes, we let them know what they're missing, but they let us know what we're missing. Yes, it gets top heavy. And sometimes I'm amazed that I've never talked about this, or I. It's extraordinary.

Darius: That would be a great conversation to have because you could put your own content there. The AIs are processing it and talking about it in the podcast. And then you could say, hey, look, I'm the author here. I just wondered if there was any kind of things you think I might have missed or things you think that it would be good to, to know more about. And the, and the podcasters would come on and go, well, while we've got you here, it would be really interesting to know more about such. And you know, because I know other commentators have talked about it, but I'd really like to know your take on that. That would be a fascinating thing.

Erica: Experiment, experiment. What I love is how upbeat they are, how neutral they are. And it's hard for people to be neutral because we have our own opinions, right. And the fact that they are the ultimate in cognitive flexibility.

Darius: So in the. In effect, this is really a study buddy session you're creating. It's not really a podcast, is it? They're kind of creating this study buddy thing. You know how at university I used to always envy mature students when I was at law school?

Darius: All the mature students at law school, those who are 30 or 40 years old, who had really come to the university and decided, I'm going to be a lawyer, I'm going to take this really seriously. They would have these study groups, informal study groups, where two, three or four of them would meet at the cafe at a set time and they'd all study a particular topic, and they discuss it. And it would be like an informal tutorial, but they'd teach each other. They might even say, look, I'll take this legal case and present it. I'll take that one and you take that one. We'll split the reading between us, and we'll share what it is. But basically that's what's happening here. These two AIs are coming in, having read all the reading, sharing their subjects, and you're coming in with these study buddies and talking to them and asking them questions.

Erica: Well, you know, and interesting that that triggered something else for me is what if you had a group project, you could then go on a zoom and share it with the group. And then you could all riff together with NotebookLM to really organize something that's outstanding.

Darius: Absolutely. And then the Notebook LM could take

00:30:00

Darius: on more of this sort of support role. Whereas, like, where did we talk about that? And they would go, oh, that was episode 34, when you talked about, you know, such and such. You know, like, we could load up our podcasts. You know, I mean, let's do that.

Erica: Yeah, let's put all of our episodes in there. And then we can also ask, what are some areas that we really have not fully explored or even other.

Darius: Things like pull out some common themes that you can see going through it with regard to working memory that are unusual. And you go, well, in episode 23 you talked about working memory in this way, and you use this analogy in episode 50 through 4, this. And, and so on you go, that would be a fun one. Go and find all the metaphors and concepts we explained within this podcast and sort of pull together them all for this particular topic, et cetera. And also the ability for AI to speak in your language. So what I like to do a lot is, is to say, could you turn this, explain it to me like I'm a 5-year-old and use a metaphor for this. And if you're really sophisticated in this, you might say, I'm really into sailing and the wind and the Scottish coastline and birds. So if you could tie it into something like that. And you go, well, actually, this is. You could think of this like a sail. The way that a sail is created and made and stitched together and so on. It's very similar to this. And, and you go, oh, I get the connection. And so it connects it with something you know quite a lot about. And, using that metaphor for that transferable knowledge.

Erica: I, I would, I'm really curious how, what kind of timeline it would create out of our, all of our content. And it, and it's Because I think you and I have matured. You and me. It's, it's almost been a map of our learning and the depth of our learning on, functioning. Because I would say that I knew a lot about executive functioning when I started the podcast, but I know so much more now. So it's really like a pathway of, of our learning and our combined riffing off of each other.

Darius: That would be an interesting question. You know, you would ask NotebookLM, how do you think Darius understanding of working memory has developed from episodes one to now? You know, like, well, Darius said this in episode such and such, and then he talked about this and so on, and he tends to think of working memory now as, you know, et cetera.

Erica: Right, but. And you could even say, are we missing anything? Wouldn't that be interesting?

Darius: Yes, that would be really interesting. And it would also be interesting to think about podcast ideas as well. You know, it's like, look, considering this body of work of 82 podcast episodes we've made so far over the last, what is it, three years? Has it been three years?

Erica: Maybe?

Darius: Yeah. What do you think are interesting themes that aren't talked about elsewhere, or gaps where people would like to know more about, etc. And it might suggest a few topics to talk on.

Erica: I'm sure it would suggest more than a few. I mean, it's really extraordinary. But the last thing I want to talk about before we go into the executive functioning piece is how amazing it is at multimodal processing, because I feel like that's what makes this, that's what puts the cherry on top of the sundae, is that you can process auditorily, you can listen to it, you can see it, you can sequence it, you can see the big picture, which is simultaneous processing. It allows you to verbalize your thoughts, it allows you to interact with the technology, it allows you to reflect upon it and even share your reflections and riff on that. It gives you direct experience because you're able to interact with it. It gives you the indirect experience by listening to the podcasts. It's just amazing. The only thing it doesn't do is the rhythmic, melodic and kinesthetic. But you can make it kinesthetic by taking a walk and using it.

Darius: Yeah. Does it create like mind maps or visuals or anything? Have you done anything visual like that?

Erica: Not yet.

Darius: Not yet, because I know a lot of AIs. Well, every AI will create a mind map for you, a flat static mind map for you, if you ask it. And also, diagrams tend to be much more common because it's interesting that you use the term multimodal. You're using multimodal in terms of the mental processing of human beings. How we.

Erica: Multimodal, multiprocessing.

Darius: But these are also multimodal LLMs. Are you aware of that?

Erica: Fill in the audience.

Darius: So there's different kinds of AIs. So there are AIs that are specifically trained on text and so they give out a text. There are AIs that are specifically trained on speech, so they give outspoken word, others on images, others on music. Whereas this AI and the more recent AIs are multimodal because they've been trained on all of them at once. So they don't just listen to the transcript of the YouTube video, they look at the pictures, they hear the words and the intonation, and they read the transcript all at once. So they're being taught in a multimodal way, which means that when they speak to you, they speak to you with multimodal intonation on the topic. They're not injecting that understanding that that understanding is being taken along with those particular words and context. It's embedded. That's right. So they are actually multimodal and they're very good at looking at, ah, pictures and your computer screen, for example, so you can show them your computer screen. Take a screenshot of your computer screen and say, explain this bit of software for me. I don't know what to do next. And it'll tell you what to do next because it understands the layout and the software. It'll say, ah, this is Google Docs, and you want to change this page. Sizing. Oh, you click on that button over there and you do this, and you do that. And it does it by sight, it recognizes it by sight because it's being trained multimodally.

Erica: So cool. So I just want to do. I know we've been talking for quite a while, but I want to do a quick exploration about how this supports the different areas of executive functioning. So it's kind of summarizing a lot of what we've talked about for when it comes to working memory. It's just this incredible place where you can dump an enormous amount of content. So even if your working memory is a little overtaxed, you can dump it into there and then it can help you to process and to reprocess in multimodal ways. So I really think it's a great resource. It reminds me of Apple Notes. Apple Notes on steroids.

Darius: Yes, right.

Erica: It's Apple Notes, but it's more multimodal.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: And this searching is even better.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: And more comprehensive. And it's more like a web, literally, or like a net.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Then it's more three dimensional than linear.

Darius: I wonder what Ivy Notes put into it would be like. Because Ivy Notes, you would have the audio, you'd have the transcript, and you had a mind map outline of the content, and it would have the context from all of that of your lectures in one place.

Erica: That would be really interesting. Another really cool thing to explore.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: So another thing for executive functioning, organizing and planning.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: The fact that it's so easy to structure.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: again like Google Keep, which is just so easy to learn. It's so easy to learn. You know, it's so easy to create a folder and categories and themes. So time management is another really good thing that it can help you with. It can help you with breaking down the big projects so that they don't feel so overwhelming. It can help you to study for exams. So it takes out all the grunt work, it takes out all the time-consuming grunt work so that you can stay on top of the higher-level thinking.

Darius: Yeah. And on that point, one of the things that I think this could be really useful for is goal setting. And you know, like if you put your long-term goals into a notebook and put content into it, sometimes you can have a big goal, you're setting your vision, but then breaking it down to what am I going to do next? Is the weak point. Executive function weak point. But it's got the context of your goals, what you're aiming for, what your priorities are, and it can work within that context. It'd be fascinating to have like a goal setting notebook for your long term, medium term, short term, everything in one.

Erica: Right. You just throw everything you got to do in there and then it will, it'll help you to.

Darius: Well, maybe not even everything that you've got to do. I'm thinking more, you know, sometimes you've got your to do list of all the things that you've got to do. But that whole category of important but not urgent.

Erica: Right.

Darius: It's like this is important but it's not shouting at me to get done, but I really need to do it to achieve what I personally want to achieve in my life. Sometimes you need a space for that. And I could see myself creating a space in a notebook. LM to say, look, I want to reflect on what's really quite important to do next that isn't urgent, that isn't being shouted at from my task List.

Erica: Good point. It can also help with inhibitory control, where it can kind of focus your attention. It's nice because it's such a simple platform. It's

00:40:00

Erica: not too overwhelming. Yeah, it's really, really clear. There's just a limited number of buttons, but it's unfolds just. It's a very nice interface. It's very clean.

Darius: Could you just state the obvious for me? It's, how do you find NotebookLM? Is it in the Google kind of interface or something?

Erica: Like, if you just type in NotebookLM in Google, it has a website. You click on it and then it just asks you, would you like to create an account? You hit yes, and then you're. It opens up and you. You're right in that thing where it asks you if you want to create a notebook.

Darius: Okay.

Erica: So there's nothing you have to sign up for. If you're already. That is, if you already are set up on Google, if you already have a Gmail account, then it's seamless. It's fast and seamless.

Darius: Okay.

Erica: I love the fact that it helps with problem solving and cognitive flexibility. The fact, you can just have a conversation either with it or with the podcast hosts is really, really nice because I think it can really give you the opportunity to find gaps, discover new ideas. For someone like me, you know, I live alone, it's really nice to have a little bit of interaction that I wouldn't normally have.

Darius: Yeah, I like that. talking to ChatGPT with the voice when I've got a thought on something. Give me your take. Let's look at it from this point of view. Let's look at that point of view. You know, the context isn't that big within it, but just to have, like an ongoing project and you go into that space to think about it, talk about it, I like that a lot, you know, that you hold that context.

Erica: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty neat. And I just thought, just to put the ribbon on top of the podcast, just to give an example of how it could be useful for students, professionals, and then personal use.

Darius: Okay.

Erica: So for students, we've talked a little bit about how it could help you prepare for finals. Now, I had a student that had never used it, and his final was next week, and he just threw all the content in and was like, wow. But you could also use it throughout the semester where you're throwing content in. You could even technically take your class notes in there. After the class, you throw in your teacher's slides. You just have to turn it I think to a JPEG or PNG. And then you can take all your slides and just toss them in there. So it's something that you can kind of build throughout the semester or just at the end. It allows you to kind of listen to summaries while walking to class. It allows you to create flashcards. It gives you the content for creating flashcards. And you can either do them manually or you could throw that information into Quizlet and then the timelines.

Darius: I could really see students who are, you know, using Ivy, for example, to transcribe their notes and so on. They could just take the transcript of every single lecture they've been to and, have a conversation with the lecturer, as it were.

Erica: Yeah, you can throw a transcript in there, or you can just throw in the audio. Cause it takes MP3, of course.

Darius: You could just throw in the audio as well. Yeah, yeah.

Erica: So it gives you lots of different options. So for students, it's just fantastic. You know, one of the things that I heard one student do, which is he would just take his articles, throw it in there, turn it into a podcast, and then listen to it while he was in his car. I do think it is important to read articles because we're strengthening our reading skills. so you don't want to over podcast things. I mean, what's ideal is if you can at least read it or skim the article and then listen to the podcast, because then you're going to have more intelligent questions to ask it.

Darius: Or the other way around. Some people like to just have the big picture and the context quickly. And then right now I've got the big picture and context.

Erica: I'll, go read the articles.

Darius: Reading of the article. So I mean, often when you're taught to read an article, it's like right before you read the article, beginning to end, you read the headline, the introduction, a few summary headings and so on. Scan through the headings, read the final conclusion. So you got the general big picture, scaffolded it. Now you can go in and read it. And your brain's got a schema, you know, built up the outline of a schema.

Erica: And if you're like, oh, but, but I hate reading. I hate reading. I don't want. I just have my eyes get tired. I just don't have the time. It's too exhausting. I am a firm believer that reading auditorily is the same as reading visually. It's just a different way of processing. You're still reading. Don't feel like you're cheating by not letting your eyes scan. But. But remember that if you're not scanning text, your eyes are going to lose that strength, right?

Darius: Yeah, yeah.

Erica: we have. There. There's a certain. Just like, if you, if you stop exercising, your muscles get

00:45:00

Erica: weaker. Same with your eyes. Your eyes scanning back and forth. It is a muscle, and so it's going to make it harder for you to read if you don't read very much. So it's just an interesting way to think about it. But yes, I do believe that auditory reading through your. You're reading through your ears instead of through your eyes. And frankly, we're getting to the point with technology that you may never have to read with your eyes again. So it's not as big of a problem as it used to be. But I just want people to be aware of the fact that you are going to be weakening certain muscles.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: But you are strengthening other ones. So it's just something to be aware of. For professionals, what could we do? You could store meeting notes, reports, project plans. You can do quick searches of maybe you were sick, and you missed, a meeting. You could take the transcripts or the audio or the notes and throw it in there, and then you could listen to it. But there's so many things that you could do. F FAQs, it could help you to prepare for a meeting. It can create timelines, track deadlines. It does all sorts of things.

Darius: It would. I think one of the things I coach people with dyslexia and ADHD to use AI in the workplace over the last couple of years since ChatGPT came out. And one of the things we use it for is for interviews. So it's sometimes really helpful to use the Voice function on ChatGPT and ask it to interview you. So, for example, a guy was applying to get into America, and as a student, and it's a very rigorous interview procedure. And you've got like seven minutes to get your case across. And there's key questions. And if you waffle on or you ramble, they just think you're being evasive. And if you're being evasive, then obviously you're not coming to America for the right reason, et cetera, you know, so they're reading a lot in. And if you've got dyslexia or adhd, you can ramble a bit to get to the point. And so this ability to just practice what you're saying and that AI to take on the role and the knowledge, so you kind of put in the context of you're a security person at the. You're an immigration officer at the Edinburgh, at the American, embassy in London, and you're going to interview me for this particular criteria and you put the criteria in as documents and all the rest of it. And then, so start asking me questions and be a bit harsher, whatever, and you can really respond backwards and forwards. And I imagine if you did all of this in NotebookLM, you'd have a lot richer response because you'd put in your own context, and you maybe turn it around and you put in your sort of CV and stuff like that. And then you turn it around and say to it, well, if you were asking these questions, what stuff do you know about me that you think that I missed out? And you go, well, you missed out that you did this work experience with these children, and you want to come back to the UK and continue doing that. That's a pretty important thing. You're emphasizing that you're returning back to the UK and that you're picking up useful skills. Oh, gosh, yes. That's great. And so on. So using it for this sort of practicing business stuff, whether it's interviews or presentations, is great.

Erica: You could even ask it. All right, I've got to remember all of these things. I'm afraid I'm going to forget some. Can you give me a memory strategy?

Darius: Yes, yes. And actually in that context, what we did was he ended up with a mind map of about. We started off with quite complex mind map of maybe 20, 30, 40, 50 words for them, him to practice talking through. And it distilled down into about eight different elements. Okay. And then we started to use memory strategy of the images he would put on the branches so that when he was in the interview, he wouldn't be reading the words, he'd just be scanning down the images and know that he had kind of visually gone through the checklist and he'd actually tick off the things he got in. The first time he failed, but the second time he got in because he was really clear, got to the point. It's like, can you afford this? Yes, I can afford it because of X, Y and Z. Oh, great. And stuff like that. And it was good to get the feedback from the LLM because it was kind of like, oh, you've gone over time. You just explained 23 different things in your spreadsheet. That is irrelevant. He just wants the top three items.

Erica: Oh, right, right, yeah. I mean, it's been such a fascinating podcast. But before we go, I want to talk about personal use, and we've talked about a little of this. I love this one. Planning for big events. Like, what about planning for a wedding? Yeah, right. That could be amazing. Or managing personal goals. That's

00:50:00

Erica: something that you were saying. Like, ah, ah. That could be really useful. It could help you to manage what's important. What's important for today. And generating audio. Remind. Creating summaries to keep you motivated. Processing ideas aloud. I love that. I love that. Or even asking it. Am I being cognitively inflexible? I'm really struggling. This relationship. Is it me? You know, would it be me? Could it be me? What are all the different.

Darius: Have you done that? Have you done that? Or is that just theoretical? Have you ever done that?

Erica: I have not done that.

Darius: Yeah, yeah. The thing is, whenever I have done stuff like that, what I find is that you need to be very good at prompting to make that work properly. Prompt engineering. Because it ends up being generic. Are you looking after personal health? Your personal health care? Are you getting enough? Are you doing this? It's all, all kind of generic. Yeah. No, no, no. I don't want generic.

Erica: Oh. But that's what's different about NotebookLM. It's really big. The information that you've given them.

Darius: yes. If you put in information that was CBT training or some other kind of type of feedback that you wanted, it would then emphasize M that more within the context of its intelligence. That would be interesting.

Erica: Right. And you would have to put in all the information and because it's easy just to not say enough about yourself or the other person. So you'd have to give enough data for it to be. You might be able to give it a, a list of emails or letters that you've received or.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Conversation. Audio conversations that you've had with her.

Darius: So you've got the context.

Erica: So, that you. That you've got the full context because it's, it's as limited as you are in giving it the information. So you have to make sure that you're very comprehensive in what you provide it.

Darius: Can I go on to a topic that's a little bit timely but off. Off topic?

Erica: Sure. I guess this is pretty much where we're wrapping up anyway, so.

Darius: Sure. So just bonus AI insight is shockwaves have gone throughout the world within the AI and financial community because of one particular release by Deep Seek. Have you heard of the Deep Seq? I have. So Deep Seek released R1, their model, six days ago, seven days ago. Some. Something like that.

Erica: And this is out of China.

Darius: Isn't it out of China? Yeah. And it's so, so crazy what they've done. It's incredible and scary and weird and so many interesting thoughts on this.

Erica: Very, very cheap. And that's what's making all the stocks, crash.

Darius: Yes. So the stock market on Nvidia crashed by 17% in one day yesterday. And the whole stock market's also been affected by it in general as well, because Nvidia just lost £465 billion off its valuation. That investment that Donald Trump was presenting a few days ago, that 500 billion would come in for AI, well, that equivalent has just been wiped off. The whole value of Nvidia and about 1 to 2 trillion of the value of the stock market has been wiped off because of this one model that was released. And this one model, what it, what they've done is deep seq r 1. They've basically created the equivalent of OpenAI's O1 model, which is expensive and very powerful. One of the best models in the world. And it does systematic chain of thought reasoning and it's even more smart than this notebook LM here. And what they've managed to do is be able to run IT on 1/20 of the power input and 1/20 of the cost for the same level of output. And they've released it open source, so anyone can take it and run it on their own computer at home if they've got a powerful enough computer, which OpenAI won't do. That's all behind a black box. And they've released the weights, they've released every aspect of how someone else can recreate exactly what they've done themselves. And people are doing that. So basically what the Chinese have done is said, we've kind of figured out how you do things behind that paywall of OpenAI. We're just going to replicate it, make it even better and then release it to the whole world open source and chop the legs out from underneath these American model makers, anthropic OpenAI and so on. It's an interesting approach to the competition is just to const is to burn down the competition by making it so cheap that they've got a lot less competitive advantage.

00:55:00

Darius: So it's fascinating to see the approach China's taking by releasing this model.

Erica: Very interesting question, do you want to make that into a podcast, the R1?

Darius: No, no, no. I think it's enough to just talk about R1 as it is. It's quite technical, but I don't know.

Erica: We could talk about; we could talk about it in a few weeks.

Darius: Yeah, we'll see how it goes. Yeah.

Erica: Okay.

Darius: But I think the way the world is going is we're going to need private AIs. We're going to need AIs that are private to us, that are on our phone, on our computer that no one else has access to. We can share our own personal thoughts with it. No one else has access to it. And actually R1, as long as they've not put some Chinese spyware backdoor thingamajiggy in the.

Erica: That's what makes me nervous.

Darius: Yeah. But the good thing is it's open-source code and software that it's actually hard to create backdoors if you create an open-source software because the engineers can see everything and they're very good at hunting these things down. So there's a lot of advantage to that.

Erica: So I guess, I guess some advice would be just give it a little bit of time, let people do their investigating before you're throwing a bunch of content on there. Because we just have to be a little careful who has access to our information.

Darius: And we kind of need to be a bit careful if Google has access to our information as well because this is Google Gemini, this is Google NotebookLM, putting a lot of personal stuff in there. And Google has no scruples about understanding what your data is and dealing with it in all sorts of different ways. You know, they're much more relaxed about data than Apple is in general, for example. But Apple is so way behind. I'm actually thinking, Erica, you won't believe this, but I'm actually considering for the first time of going to Android to use the Google AI system on my phone and move away from Apple and even use Google keep and so on. I'm experimenting with it because Google's AI model is so phenomenally good.

Erica: Wow, that's big coming from you.

Darius: It is, it is. And I think a lot of people are pondering on it. And Apple are kind of really holding back at the moment. They're years behind.

Erica: Well, and Google, a lot of the Google systems or products are a fraction of the cost.

Darius: They are. And Google have just totally upped their game just in the last month to two months. Totally up their game. They've got some other stuff in the pipeline like Google Deep Research, which is similar to NotebookLM, but it's like Notebook LM on steroids and it produces some incredible reports. I haven't figured out how to use it yet because it's quite, it's in A deep beta. And it's all a bit confusing, but I've heard other people talking about it coming up and Google are really doing some significant stuff. And Google have got this amazing function that I've been using a lot where you can switch on, the Google Gemini 2 and ask it to look at your screen and talk to you while you're doing something on your screen. So let's say you're using a piece of software, you're using it, and you go, hey, how do I do this? It goes, oh, go, go up here and do that. And if you're coding on something, okay.

Erica: Like one of my students was doing like a WIX. She was just working on a new website on WIX. Yes, you could just. How do you do that? How do you get, how do you, how do you turn that on?

Darius: So you go to aistudio.google.com Google AI Studio, and it's basically called Talk with Gemini Live. And you can switch on the microphone and share your screen, and you show whatever screen you want to show and it just copilots you and talks to you. You could be looking at your website and you're scrolling through your website, and you think, what do you think of my website, by the way? As I'm scrolling through it, and it reads what's on your website? And you don't have to wait for it to read. You could just scroll really quickly through your whole website. It's read it all. And then you go from. If you were a UI UX user experience expert on this, what would you do in this scenario? I'm not sure about the wording and the heading in this section here. You just talk it through. And it would go, well, I would maybe do such and such. And so I use it with developing Ivy, for example. And I say, look, if you were a new user and you had this interface and you were doing this, what would you think about this sort of error notification popping up? And it would go, well, that error notification might worry you a little bit. Maybe you should change the wording and explain what's just happened and what the person can do that they can refresh and it's not a problem. And you go, gosh,

01:00:00

Darius: yes, that would be quite good. And you change it, and it would even tell you the code to change it, et cetera. So that the interactive side of something in real time is fantastic. Google are really coming out close to a head.

Erica: That's really interesting. All right, well, I guess we should wrap up this podcast this week. But a lot of amazing content.

Darius: And it's really great for executive functions.

Erica: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. To pull it all back around. Okay, well, I'm excited about next week. I'm not sure what it's going to be now, but we'll talk a little bit about that next time. Next time. Bye.

Darius: Bye.

Erica: Sponsored by GoodsensoryLearning.com Engaging, remedial, materials that bring delight to learning.

Darius: Sponsored by Ivy. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. It's ideal for students and managers with dyslexia or ADHD. Try ivvi for free now at Ivy, app. That's ivvi.app. thank you for joining us at the Executive Function Brain Trainer podcast.

Erica: Check out our show notes for links and resources and follow us on social media.

01:01:14

Episode 80: Notebook LM: A Tool to Support Executive Functions

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