ChatGPT is bad for your brain? MIT study: "You risk cognitive debt"

Using ChatGpt and other artificial intelligence tools on a daily basis would have serious repercussions on the ability to learn, think and remember . This is revealed by a study from MIT in Boston , the first of its kind, which measured the brain activity of three groups of students with electrodes : the first working with ChatGpt , the second with Internet access (but without artificial intelligence tools) and the third with other more traditional tools . The results, claims the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , are unequivocal.

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The paper has an explicit title: “Your Brain and ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Writing Tasks.” The study was led by Natalia Kosmyna, a PhD researcher in computer science who works on the interaction between computers and the human brain . The research model of Kosmyna and her colleagues, who included several neuroscientists and language scientists, was entirely experimental.

Kosmyna formed three groups from a sample of 54 volunteers , assigning each member to write three short texts for three successive sessions on predefined topics , for a period spanning one quarter.

The first “Brain-only” group could write only on the basis of their own mental resources, without access to either the Internet or a screen. The second group had access to Google’s search engine . The third group instead had access to generative artificial intelligence, in particular ChatGPT by Open AI .

The brains of participants in all three groups were scanned by connecting them to electrodes for electroencephalography while they performed the required task.

In the same writing process, the members of the three groups showed very different activations of their minds. Compared to the level of the group that wrote without digital support, the group with access only to the search engine recorded a brain connectivity between 34% and 48% lower; the group with access to ChatGPT (in the form of GPT-4o) showed a brain connectivity 55% lower . In essence, the more consistent the support, the more the amplitude of brain activity is reduced .

The MIT researchers found that "The use of AI had a measurable impact on participants, and participants in the ChatGpt group performed worse than their counterparts at every level: neural, linguistic, and score." They emphasized that "like any tool, ChatGpt has its pros and cons" and that their study "focuses on uncovering the cognitive cost of using a LLM (large language models) in an educational context."

The “Brain-only” group shows an activation of the areas of the brain connected to creative ideation, to the integration of meanings between them and to self-monitoring : the functions necessary to generate contents, plan them and review them.

Instead, those who use Google mainly work the occipital and visual cortex: the areas that preside over assimilating through sight the information obtained on the screen and then collecting it. Finally, those who use ChatGPT mainly activate the areas for almost automatic functions and within an external framework.

In essence, relying on AI generates conformism of thought and messages. But here came a further surprise: in 83% of cases, those who had worked with ChatGPT then had difficulty quoting sentences from their own texts just a few minutes after having delivered them; as if those who had written with ChatGPT had not developed any sense of belonging regarding the content of their work and all their attention had gone only to how to passively reproduce information generated externally. On the contrary, almost all those who had worked alone were able to quote sentences from the texts they had just written almost exactly, showing much more attention to the content and meaning of the work done (not just to the methods) .

Those who were used to relying on ChatGPT still showed weaker brain activation when left without digital support , as if their minds had become lazier and incapable of creativity, judgment of merit and deep memory.

Instead, those who had already learned to think and produce work independently enhanced their cognitive abilities with ChatGPT.