According to HotHardware, a University of Pennsylvania study had 250 people write health advice, with some using AI and others using regular Google searches. The AI users produced significantly less helpful advice than those who wrote themselves. Meanwhile, an MIT study measured brain activity during essay writing and found ChatGPT users showed the lowest activity levels. Most damningly, 83% of ChatGPT users couldn’t recall a single sentence of their essays just one minute after submission. A separate JAMA study from UCSF analyzed four years of data showing children who use social media perform much worse on reading, memory, and vocabulary tests compared to non-users. The research consistently points toward technology causing measurable cognitive decline.
Your Brain Is A Muscle – Use It Or Lose It
Here’s the thing that makes these studies so compelling – they’re basically confirming what we already intuitively knew. If you have someone else do your work, you’ll get worse at doing that work yourself. The MIT researcher put it perfectly: “If you don’t remember what you wrote, you don’t feel ownership. Do you even care?” And that’s the real problem – when AI does the creative heavy lifting, you’re not actually learning or retaining anything.
Think about it like physical exercise. If you pay someone to lift weights for you, your muscles aren’t getting stronger. Your brain works exactly the same way. The UPenn and MIT studies show that AI-assisted work leads to what researchers call “cognitive atrophy” – basically, your thinking muscles get weaker from lack of use.
Social Media’s Hidden Cognitive Cost
But it’s not just AI causing problems. The social media findings are equally concerning. Children who used any social media showed measurable declines in fundamental cognitive skills. Why? Because time spent scrolling is time not spent reading, creating, or even sleeping properly. Basically, their brains aren’t getting the workout they need during critical developmental years.
And let’s be honest – how many of us adults feel sharper after an hour of TikTok versus an hour of reading? The endless scroll format seems designed to keep us engaged while demanding very little actual mental effort. It’s cognitive junk food that leaves our brains undernourished.
So How Should We Actually Use These Tools?
Does this mean we should completely abandon AI and social media? Probably not entirely practical. But we need to be way more intentional about how we use them.
With AI, the key is to avoid outsourcing creative work. Using ChatGPT for research assistance or proofreading? That can be productive. Having it write your entire essay or business proposal? That’s where the brain rot sets in. And always, always fact-check AI output – these models still hallucinate constantly.
As for social media, the evidence suggests we should treat it like candy – fine in very small doses, but definitely not something to build your cognitive diet around. Maybe ask yourself: is this enriching my mind or just killing time?
Ultimately, these studies serve as a wake-up call. Technology should enhance our capabilities, not replace them. Your brain is your most valuable asset – maybe it’s time we started treating it that way again. Image by mirkosajkov
