Is Artificial Intelligence Slowing Our Brain Functioning?

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by Dr. Julie Radlauer-Doerfler and Spence Abel

Have you ever heard the expression, “Use it or lose it”?

Nowhere does this idiom apply more than to the brain. Sure, the brain isn’t a muscle, but to keep it sharp, it still needs consistent neural exercise. Whether we know it or not, we exercise our brains on a daily basis. We do so when we go for walks, cook dinner, chat with friends, and, of course, while at work and school.

But times are changing.

Back in the day, if we wanted to get just about anything done, we had to rely on our entire mental faculty to do so. Today, many of us are resorting to shortcuts. Instead of relying on our own intelligence, we use artificial intelligence to do the brainwork for us.

But is all this fear about AI coming for our minds warranted?

A new MIT study put that question to the test when it examined the minds of 54 participants ages 18-39. Participants were split into three groups and asked to write a series of essays while hooked up to an EEG that measured brain activity across 32 regions. One group could use ChatGPT, another Google, and the last had the unenviable task of writing essays with no aid at all.

After writing a series of essays, researchers found that the group that had access to ChatGPT had the lowest brain engagement of all groups. In fact, 83 percent of the participants who used ChatGPT to write couldn’t remember anything that they wrote just minutes later. Not only this, but researchers found that this group became lazier over time and that after each subsequent essay, they recorded less and less neural activity.

The researchers of this paper are now running a similar experiment with coders, and early findings show that the results are even worse. With the help of AI, coders are more productive, but early results show that this has come at the cost of their creative and critical thinking skills.

It’s clear that if we continue down this route, we, too, will become bots. While eschewing AI will undoubtedly lead to higher cognitive abilities, quitting it altogether isn’t an option. We’ve seen the benefits of artificial intelligence. If used correctly, it can make us more productive and decrease busy work without degrading our mental capacities.

To get the most out of this disruptive tech, we need to figure out how to keep it at the periphery of whatever the task is at hand. Whether we’re creating or problem-solving, AI must be relegated to the role of assistant rather than a leader.

One way this can be done is by using tools like ChatGPT to provide explanations instead of answers that go unquestioned. In this way, AI would share how it came to an answer and would educate and invite humans to further question its reasoning, rather than provide us with an unvetted response that we then copy and paste.

AI should always be treated as a complement, rather than a centerpiece, especially when it comes to mentally taxing activities. Currently, there are few guardrails in place to prevent us from over-reliying on bot armies to do our work for us.

So, what can we do?

One easy fix is to delete chatbots from our phones. With a couple of clicks, you can get rid of the small arsenal of AI bots you already have under your employ. Of course, chatbots that we keep on our phones aren’t the only AI tools capable of eroding our cognitive skills; however, they are usually the most accessible ones. Creating this distance will naturally lead you to rely on them less and less.

A second solution is to be intentional about the way we use AI and choose to keep our skills sharp rather than cutting corners. These shortcuts take away from our ability to exercise our brains and feel the oxytocin jolt of accomplishing a difficult task. Relegate AI to the portions of the task that do not require critical thinking.

A third is to remind ourselves about what brings us excitement. Learning a skill is the most gratifying and nourishing of activities. There is a reason that, despite having the ability to create music with AI, not everyone is doing it. Learning a skill like the piano or a new language is a highly rewarding process. We need to remind ourselves just how rewarding this can be. To do so, pick up a new hobby. Maybe you’ve always wanted to paint or make a meal just as good as you’ve had at a restaurant.

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Keep your brain sharp and remind yourself that you don’t need AI to get the results you’re looking for. By learning, we empower ourselves and will choose to rely upon our own mental faculties rather than on AI tools that have been repeatedly shown to erode our cognitive skills, make us lazier, and even more alone than ever before.