How AI Impacts Our brain

Lately every other day on my LinkedIn feed, I see someone sharing how AI "transformed their workflow" or "10x'd their productivity."

During my final year in my engineering, I had a subject that I never got around to study due to laziness, so I borrowed notes from friends instead of preparing my own notes in class.

Smart move, but come exam time? I struggled as I could never recall the concepts.
Now Looking back, I can clearly see that
• I only had surface-level understanding of material
• No personal connection to the learning process
• Relied too heavily on others' interpretation
• Couldn't think through problems independently
For my final exam, I did take time to study, ending with a B grade for the course

Now reading the MIT's study (Your Brain on ChatGPT) made me think back to my experience. Researchers used brain scans to measure what happens when people write essays using AI vs doing it themselves.
The results?
• People using AI showed weaker neural connections and couldn't remember what they'd written.
• Their brains literally did less work.

Lately all over my social media feed, I see the same pattern:
• "AI wrote my strategy document in 10 minutes"
• "ChatGPT handles all my client proposals now"
• "Why think when AI can do it faster?"
• "Just prompt engineer your way to success"

Here's what caught my attention: People felt less ownership over AI-assisted work. Just like how I never really owned those borrowed notes.

This clearly highlights our tendency to mistake efficiency for effectiveness. We're building what researchers call "cognitive debt" - outsourcing thinking so much that we weaken our ability to think.

Now its still early days and we might need more data to understand overall impact.
For routine tasks? AI is brilliant. But for anything that requires deep understanding, maybe we should think twice before hitting that generate button.

Link to the Research Paper