Does AI Make You Dumberer? Cognitive Debt and The Real Risk of Letting AI Do All the Thinking

There’s been a lot of buzz the past few weeks about a new MIT study that people are summarizing with headlines like “AI rots your brain.” I get the impulse to make a splashy headline at the expense of accuracy, but it completely misses the point.

The study, titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” looked at how people’s brains responded while writing essays using different tools: ChatGPT, Google, or nothing at all.

Participants wore EEG headsets so the researchers could measure brain activity, and the results were pretty straightforward:

When people let ChatGPT write the whole thing for them, their brains didn’t engage much, which is pretty obvious, but even after they stopped using AI, their brains were not fully engaged in later tasks.

The researchers called this lingering effect “cognitive debt.” It’s like skipping mental reps: if you don’t use the part of your brain that thinks, writes, and reflects, it doesn't just sit out for one task, it takes some time for your brain to ramp back up to full engagement.

But here’s the important part that got lost in the headlines:

The problem wasn’t using AI. The problem was using AI passively.

The participants who just copied and pasted ChatGPT’s output without editing, questioning, or even reading it closely, were the ones who showed the biggest drop in engagement and retention. They couldn’t recall much of what they “wrote,” and their brains basically checked out.

That’s not how most thoughtful professionals use AI. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

So what does this mean for the rest of us?

If you’re using AI to explore ideas, draft outlines, ask better questions, or reflect on what you’re building, you’re in good shape. In fact, the research suggests that kind of engaged use keeps your brain active.

But if you're just dumping a prompt into ChatGPT and copy/pasting the answer without thinking, you're shortchanging yourself. Not because the output is necessarily bad, but because you’re not learning, remembering, or growing.

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, especially as my team and I use AI in our daily work. We've seen huge benefits in better documentation, faster responses, less stress, but we’ve also had to be intentional about how we use these tools.

Here’s what’s working for us:

• Start with your own thinking. Don’t let the AI take the first crack, you write a draft or at least some bullet points, then get feedback or ideas from the tool.

• Stay in the loop. Edit, question, reword, reframe. Treat AI like a collaborator, not a ghostwriter.

• Be curious. Ask why the AI made certain choices. Push it to explain. That’s where the real value is.

  
  

AI is powerful but only if we use it in a way that keeps us engaged. Otherwise, we’re just offloading the thinking, and that doesn’t help anyone in the long run.

There’s a lot of opportunity here, but only if we stay intentional about how we show up to the work.