Beware cognitive surrender: How to stop your brain being dumbed down by AI
New research suggests that offloading our thinking to AI maybe rapidly making us stupider. But don’t despair. There are strategies we can use to take advantage of the technology’s potential while preserving our mental powers.
5-minute read – 100% written by humans
At the heart of the matter is a phenomenon known as cognitive surrender. If cognitive offloading – the ability to outsource mental work – has helped our species to advance, cognitive surrender is the darker side lurking in the shadows and offering us a Faustian pact. AI boosts the capacity for both the benefits and the risks of cognitive offloading by an order of magnitude.
The problem with cognitive offloading
As a species we have evolved the instinct to conserve cognitive capacity wherever possible, in much the same way that we instinctively conserve energy. This makes sense for our survival.
Notice how you turn down the radio playing in your car if you have to do a tricky parking manoeuvre. Ask a friend to do some mental arithmetic as they are walking along and they will likely stop. In both examples the actions taken may not seem immediately logical, but they highlight our instinct to minimize any cognitive wastage wherever possible.
When our ancestors created maps of their terrain, they freed up mental space to focus on hunting prey. That’s cognitive offloading. The development of writing was arguably the greatest leap in cognitive offloading capacity in history. Encoding information into the written word meant humans could develop more sophisticated societies while collaborating on complex tasks in far greater numbers.
Nonetheless, cognitive surrender appears to exert an ever-greater pull. Put simply, it’s often too tempting to pop the task into Chat GPT or a similar bot.
We’re doing less thinking for ourselves
We are doing less thinking and writing for ourselves. Analysis of scientific papers shows increasing use of AI favoured words like, “delve”, “underscore” and “garnered.” The American business magazine Barren’s, did a search of company filings and statements for the construction: It’s-not-this-it’s-that, the overused stylistic tic of AI. The search showed that there had been an ‘intense ramping up’ of its usage.
Apparently, the term ‘slop-cannon’ is the new addition to the office’s lexicon, referring to someone who wastes the time of colleagues by sending them unfiltered AI generated slop.
This is all evidence of cognitive surrender. Apart from producing writing that is slick but tedious to read, the evidence indicates that it can cause our cognitive powers to whither at an alarming rate.
Your brain on ChatGTP
In a study entitled Your Brain on ChatGPT: A team led by Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues from MIT sought to find out whether AI assistance changes thinking, learning and memory formation. They also analysed essay content, memory recall, interviews, and essay quality scores.
They set up an experiment to compare essay writing using ChatGPT, Google Search and no external tools at all. Fifty-four university students completed essay-writing tasks over multiple sessions spanning four months. The team also used EEG scanners to look at the brain activity of participants under the different essay writing conditions.
The findings were clear. The more AI support participants received, the less their brains appeared to work. There was strong evidence of cognitive surrender among ChatGPT users who often relied heavily on generated output without modifying it.
Essays produced with ChatGPT were more similar to one another than brain-only essays; the latter showing greater diversity of ideas, language and argumentative approaches. Interestingly the search users occupied a middle ground between independent and AI-assisted writing.
Weaker recall and less ownership
It gets more interesting. The extent to which they remembered what they had written, or felt a sense of ownership of it, differed sharply between the groups.
Many ChatGPT users struggled to quote sentences from essays they had just written. Search-engine and brain-only participants recalled their own content much more accurately.
There was a similar pattern when participants were asked how much ownership they felt over their essays. Brain-only participants reported the strongest sense of ownership over their work. Search users also reported strong ownership, though slightly lower than brain-only writers. ChatGPT users reported the weakest sense of authorship and personal ownership.
If you haven’t written it, you haven’t mastered it
The point about memory and ownership matches the message that we aim to drum into leaders at our workshops: if you haven’t written it, you haven’t mastered it. And your people will invariably sense this.
Most worryingly, when heavy AI users switched back to unaided writing, their engagement and originality continued to lag significantly.
Thinking will atrophy if we don’t use it. That’s the price we pay for cognitive surrender.
Desirable difficulty
We learn not when things are effortless, but when they are desirably difficult. Those readers who have worked with Threshold will know how strongly we’re committed to the idea of ‘desirable difficulty.’
Top performers understand that desirable difficulty is essential to the process of learning. Difficulty increases focus and cognitive effort – essential ingredients if learning is to be hardwired and performance improved. Another way of thinking about this is as ‘beneficial friction.’ Too much friction results in strain, waste and inefficiency but we need the right amount of friction for growth and learning.
Build in cognitive friction
When you go to the gym, you actively seek friction. It’s the friction that literally strengthens the muscles or cardio system.
Or, instead of going for that fly-and-flop all-inclusive holiday, you may seek to map out your own trip; get around a foreign country on public transport, learn about local customs, learn a bit of the language. That’s the sort of travel that leads to cognitive growth. You are intentionally building in friction. The result is a more memorable and rewarding experience.
Three ways to keep your mental powers strong
So how can you take full advantage of AI tools, while building in enough cognitive friction to protect your mind from the atrophy caused by cognitive surrender:
- Keep the creative bit human: The author Maggie O’Farrell has a rule: use AI for research and only for research. Do the actual creative work yourself. It’s a rule that we follow at Threshold. Stories, scripts, scenarios for our immersive case studies will be thoroughly researched using all of the AI tools available, but the actual creative work must come from the human mind. Anything else may be superficially impressive but it’s oddly flat and inert.
- Ring-fence some activities as human only: Use AI tools to make your work more efficient and Productive but ring-fence some activity that remains human only.
- Mix AI with conventional google search: Emily Bender, Professor of Linguistics and the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington, strongly encourages people to use conventional internet searches when doing research. She argues that the freedom that this gives you, means that you explore with greater breadth and depth, as you’re more likely to stumble across the unexpected.
The powerful tools that we now have available to us can either be a boon or a crutch.
Making some small adjustments to the way we use them is the difference between cognitive sloth or cognitive strength.
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
