There is an old movie (2006) called “Idiocracy“. A soldier, who is average in every way, is put in stasis for a year as an army experiment. It goes wrong, and he awakens 500 years in the future. In this future, people have become so dumb that they don’t know that plants need water to grow.
It’s a superficial comedy, but also a social satire. One topic it highlights is the greed of big corporations. But there is also a real concern that people might get dumber.
AI may make us dumb
A recent study from MIT shows that using AI chatbots reduces our brain activity.
The MIT team measured the electrical activity in the brain of 54 students over a few months. The students were divided into groups and given essay-writing tasks. One group used ChatGPT, another used Google, and the last had no external help at all.
The Chat-GPT group performed worse than the others at all levels. They showed poorer memory, reduced brain activity and weaker engagement. The group, who had no external help, showed the most brain activity and originality.
This is not an isolated study. Other studies also show that relying on AI has a negative impact on our critical thinking abilities.
Cognitive offloading
How many cell phone numbers do you know? Actually remember, not have stored on your phone or listed somewhere? I’ve met people who can’t even remember their own cell phone number.
Before everyone had cell phones, you remembered at least a few numbers. Now you don’t have to, so you don’t.
This is called cognitive offloading. Cognitive offloading is when we use external tools to reduce our mental effort. So we can write information down or store it digitally, instead of trying to remember it.
This concept is based on cognitive load theory. it posits that our working memory has limited capacity. So if we offload certain tasks, we can free up our mental resources for more important things. And this can decrease mental fatigue and stress.
Don’t offload too much
But cognitive offloading has its dark side. Research, like the MIT study, warns that over-reliance on smart tools actually weakens our own mental muscles. We can go from offloading to complete outsourcing.
There was a thought-provoking post on LinkedIn a while ago. A parent boasted that her clever young son used ChatGPT to write a note to his grandmother. Many of the comments complimented the child for being so clever. But the article asked this question:
“If reading is learning, and writing is thinking — then what exactly has this child just skipped?”
It’s not just AI
Many researchers are interested in the impact of social media on our cognitive skills. All that bite-sized content reduces our attention span. We lose the habit of deep focus. Instead, we frequently switch our attention between tasks. This frequent attention switching creates stress, leads to mistakes, and slows down performance.
It seems that our brain function is under attack, and we don’t even realise it. So before you take the lazy way out with that AI tool, or switch to your TikTok app, think about that.
I’d love to hear your views.