AI is good for your brain… until it isn’t

I think we’re all losing our minds, literally.

Turns out, losing your mind isn’t when you have a breakdown, or when your life implodes. It’s what happens when you outsource the mechanics of the critical thinking you did yourself a year ago, to a Large Language Model (LLM). According to a Higher Education Policy Institute study, 95% of students use “AI in at least one way”, but only half of them believe that AI improved their experience, with a large minority believing that AI instead worsened it, citing worries about fairness and the erosion of their skill. Not to mention, it has caused the workload style to shift, with 65% of students say assessments have changed significantly because of AI. There’s a pressure to use AI, especially for those who fall behind; except, the more that you outsource to AI, the further behind you seem to fall.

Everyone still does the assignment; however, only a fraction still do the critical thinking required

AI is mainly used for two objectives: general admin or actual thinking. When I say ‘actual thinking’ is being handed over, I don’t mean people are being lobotomised, rather that the mental work is now being completed by AI. Everyone still does the assignment; however, only a fraction still do the critical thinking required, while others have passed this task on to an LLM.

Cognitive Load Theory hypothesises that your working memory (the part of your brain that holds information currently in use) is so small, in fact, estimates put it at around 4 bits. Whenever you learn something new, you fight for space across three different mental loads. The intrinsic load is the general difficulty of the material for you. Then there’s the extraneous load: the work your brain does while processing the material, such as how loud it is when you’re revising, or how much effort it takes to understand your notes. Finally, there’s the germane load, which is the actual process of understanding new information. All three combined contribute towards the action of learning, but the germane load is where your own brain understands concepts and stores it in your long-term memory.

AI can be used to decrease our mental loads, but offload the wrong information, and we cannot remember, or even understand, it for ourselves. AI is remarkably good at removing the extraneous load, as it can reformat notes and summarise texts, making topics more concise and easier to process. It’s also capable of doing the germane load for you, for example by generating an essay from a reference material; however, it removes your critical thinking from the equation. Content is submitted, but you never thought it.

Let AI handle the admin work, sure, but not your thoughts

This isn’t anything new: the academic Paul Kirschner makes a point that calculators serve a similar purpose, and people who use them consistently may no longer be able to do basic arithmetic. However, what AI does is to a much greater scale. Instead of handing off small steps, you can hand over the entire thought process. Over time, your whole way of cognitive thinking atrophies, instead of a single skill.

So maybe we are losing our minds, not in a collective worldwide breakdown, but in the way that we keep handing over the parts of thinking we’re supposed to keep. A calculator does not equate to an AI: it cost us numeric fluency but didn’t cost us our actual maths skills. Overreliance on AI can cost us our reasoning, our ability to learn, and even how we think. It effectively lobotomises us, because if we lose the ability to think, we lose the capability of critical thinking. Let AI handle the admin work, sure, but not your thoughts.