Your Brain on ChatGPT: When Intelligence Becomes a Crutch
If your brain was a muscle, ChatGPT might be the comfy sofa you’re sinking into, and this new MIT study says it’s slowly atrophying your critical thinking.
MIT just dropped a cognitive mic: relying on LLMs like ChatGPT to write essays literally makes your brain work less. Using EEG scans, researchers compared three groups, those using LLMs, search engines, and their own brains, across three writing tasks.
The result? LLM users had the weakest brain connectivity, with neural engagement diminishing in lockstep with tool dependence.
What shocked me most wasn’t that essays written with LLM help were less cognitively demanding, it’s that users struggled to recall or quote their own work. That’s not assistance; that’s amnesia by design. The study calls this “cognitive debt”: a trade-off where convenience subtracts from memory, language processing, and learning.
This isn’t just about students. Other studies show that professionals confident in AI tools lose confidence in themselves. When thinking becomes optional, trust in our own minds erodes.
- LLMs reduce brain connectivity and engagement
- Users offload memory and struggle to cite their own work
- Over-reliance on AI weakens critical thinking confidence
As we integrate AI into workflows and classrooms, the question isn’t whether we can use it. It’s whether we’re thinking hard enough when we do. So, how are you keeping your cognitive muscles in shape?
Read the full article on Tech.co.
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