What we lose when technology does the thinking

🧠 As technology races forward, our brains appear to be moving in the opposite direction. According to the Guardian, Nataliya Kosmyna, an MIT research scientist who studies brain states, has observed that generative AI and LLMs like ChatGPT are affecting people’s memories. She began investigating this phenomenon after receiving emails from strangers who reported worsening memories after continuous use of the AI tool — they wanted to know if there was a connection. And there is. Our growing reliance on AI may be costing us our intelligence, reducing our capacity for cognitive processing, attention, and creativity.

In a preliminary experiment with fellow MIT researchers, Kosmyna monitored participants’ brain activity while they wrote essays using an electroencephalogram (EEG), which monitors the brain’s electrical activity. Of the 54 participants, those who relied on digital assistance — such as search engines or ChatGPT — showed lower brain connectivity levels. More strikingly, when asked immediately after submitting their work what they had written, barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could recall a single quote from the essay they had just written.

The takeaway? Our brains atrophy when they depend too heavily on external help. We’re evolutionarily primed to use shortcuts, which is why we immediately adopt technologies that make our lives easier. The irony is that while our brains instinctively prefer shortcuts, they need to be challenged to develop — and even just to be kept in good condition. Friction is critical to thinking, yet it’s becoming systemically undermined in our world of digital convenience. Writing an essay, for instance, requires synthesizing information, considering competing perspectives, and constructing arguments — skills we use in everyday conversations.

Fears that AI and Silicon Valley are working against us no longer sound paranoid. Technology increasingly runs counter to our natural learning processes, which rely on friction. Instead, it banks on our attention with relentless informational overload. Its premise centers on providing frictionless user experiences that ironically make it harder for us to function in the friction-filled real world. In pursuit of hyperefficiency, we risk losing much of our intellectual independence, perpetually outsourcing work and memory to our devices.

The widespread impact of this shift is becoming increasingly visible. After Kosmyna posted her study online in June, she received more than 4k emails from around the world, many from stressed-out teachers who feel their students aren’t learning properly because they’re using ChatGPT to do their homework. These educators worry AI is creating a generation who can produce technically passable work, but don’t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material.

Digital multitasking has become standard, forcing us into a constant state of “continuous partial attention.” With our focus divided across so many cognitively demanding activities, our brains never fully process anything. The result is a false sense of productivity — being “on top of things without ever getting to the bottom of anything” — and stress-induced “screen apnea,” an inability to breathe properly while engrossed in digital tasks, experienced by 80% of participants in a study conducted by Linda Stone in the 90s.

At the height of AI and an information-saturated internet, Oxford University Press named “brain rot” its 2024 word of the year. Popularized online, brain rot describes the “specific feeling of mindlessness” that sets in after endless scrolling through aggressively dumb, humor-laced content. The cognitive cost of a media landscape constantly competing for our attention is already evident in our weakened memory, diminished decision-making skills, and shortened attention spans.

You’re not dumb, but AI certainly encourages you to act like you are. The shift from the traditional internet to generative AI has eroded the value of most online information. To tech companies, what you consume doesn’t matter — only that you’re consuming. Standard brain functions have no place in this new technological age, where consuming information requires very little thinking.