As soon as ChatGPT started to take off, I started saying,
We’ll have to get better at thinking. We’ll have to start thinking more deeply and think harder if we want to stand out and succeed.
Turns out, it’s even more dramatic than that!
Excessive use of ChatGPT is rotting your brain! Fact.
A fascinating study, just released from MIT, shows that excessive use of ChatGPT is actually reducing the quality of cognitive function.
Research shows that LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels when performing writing tasks.
- Neural: EEG brain studies found that there was a 47% reduction in brain activity with heavy ChatGPT users. Their brains were using 47% less neural connections when they were writing with the model.
- Behavioural: 83% of heavy model users couldn’t quote anything from what they had just written, compared to about 10% from using no technology to write.
- Linguistics: neutral analysis found that writing with LLMs was ‘soulless, empty, lacking individuality, typical’.
They use writing as a proxy for thinking as it is a cognitively hard task requiring lots of neural, linguistic and behavioural levels. It is, in essence, one of the ways we make sense of our thoughts. To put them to paper. And we are increasingly outsourcing our thinking to LLMs.
They use the metaphor of physical fitness to make sense of the use of LLMs in writing: using LLMs being the equivalent of taking a forklift truck to the gym – sure, you go to the gym, but you don’t get the physical benefits. Or munching on junk food as the equivalent of consuming TikTok videos. It’s a good metaphor that they continue by coining the term ‘cognitive debt’ and even start to consider the possibility of a cognitive obesity crisis equivalent in the future.
It’s incredible to think that brain function decreases by using and relying on LLMs. We’re not absorbing what it puts out and building new understanding, we’re actually losing our ability to think and reason!
It’s a massive warning to those companies pursuing LLMs in everything – particularly for their own workers. In essence, you’re reducing the quality of thinking in your workforce if you promote high use of LLMs in solving the company’s challenges.
This is where something like Time to Think comes into it’s own. It becomes the kind of ‘cognitive gym’ that Newport and Stulberg talk about in the podcast. It’s a protected way of being that encourages the very highest quality, independent thought. It’s going to become essential.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again – we’re going to need to get better at thinking. We’re going to need to practice it more. We’re going to have to go deeper and harder with our thinking to flourish and thrive as a species.
I’m not afraid of that. In fact, I welcome it. If you want to think with me, get in touch.
Sam Grayston 