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MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

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Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#41

"Studies" like this bite at the ankles of every change in information technology. Victorians thought women reading too many magazines would rot their minds. Given that AI is literally just words on a monitor just like the rest of the internet, I have a strong prior it's not "reprogram[ming]" anyone's mind, at least not in some manner that, e.g. heavy Reddit use might.

That’s a pretty spicy take for first thing in the morning. The confidence with which you assert a repeatedly proven facile argument is…unenviable. “Fractal wrongness,” I’ve seen it called.

We have decades of research - brain scans, studies, experiments, imaging, stimuli responses, etc - proving that when a human no longer has to think about performing a skill, that skill immediately begins to atrophy and the brain adapts accordingly. It’s why line workers at McDonalds don’t actually learn how to properly cook food (it’s all been procedured-out and automated where possible to eliminate the need for critical thinking skills, thus lowering the quality of labor needed to function), and it’s why - at present - we’re effectively training a cohort of humans who lack critical thinking and reasoning skills because “that’s what the AI is for”.

This is something I’ve known about long before the current LLM craze, and it’s why I’ve always been wary or hostile to “aggressively helpful” tools like some implementations of autocorrect, or some driving aides: I am not just trying to do a thing quickly, I am trying to do it well, and that requires repeatedly practicing a skill in order to improve.

Studies like these continue to support my anxiety that we’re dumbing down the best technical generation ever into little more than agent managers and prompt engineers who can’t solve their own problems anymore without subscribing to an AI service.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#42

> In post-task interviews: > 83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written. > In contrast, 88.9% of Search and Brain-only users could quote accurately. > 0% of LLM users could produce a correct quote, while most Brain-only and Search users could. Reminds me of my coworkers who have literally no idea what Chat GPT put into their PR from last week.

Maybe we should question the value of essays in the ChatGPT world? Could a person, armed with ChatGPT, come up with a better solution in a real world problem than without ChatGPT? Maybe that's what actually matters.

The point of writing essays is not to produce an essay, it's to demonstrate that you understand something well enough to engage with it critically, in addition to being an exercise for critical thinking itself.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#43

"Studies" like this bite at the ankles of every change in information technology. Victorians thought women reading too many magazines would rot their minds. Given that AI is literally just words on a monitor just like the rest of the internet, I have a strong prior it's not "reprogram[ming]" anyone's mind, at least not in some manner that, e.g. heavy Reddit use might.

If it wasn't for studies like this, you'd still think arsenic is a great way to produce a vibrant green color to paint your house in the color of nature!

Because of studies like this we know the burning of fossil fuels is a dead-end for us and our climate, and due to that have developed alternative methods of generating energy.

And the study actually proved that LLM usage reprograms your brain and makes you a dumbass. Social media usage does as well, those two things are not exclusive, if anything, their effects compound on an already pretty dumb and gullible population. So if your argumemt is 'but what about reddit', thats a non argument called 'whataboutism'. Look it up and hopefully it might give you a hint why you are getting downvoted.

There have been three recent studies showing that:

- 1. 95% LLM projects fail in the enterprise https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

- 2. Experienced developers get 19% less productive when using an LLM https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

- 3. LLM usage makes you dumber https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi...

We reached a stage where people on the internet mistake their opinion on a subject to be as relevant as a study on the subject.

If you don't have another study or haven't done the science to disprove this study, how come you dismiss so easily a study that actually took time, data and the scientific method to reach to a conclusion? I feel we gotta actively and firmly call out that kind of behavior and ridicule it.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#44
post #20

A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experi…

>These 54 participants were between the ages of 18 to 39 years old (age M = 22.9, SD = 1.69) and all recruited from the following 5 universities in greater Boston area: MIT (14F, 5M), Wellesley (18F), Harvard (1N/A, 7M, 2 Non-Binary), Tufts (5M), and Northeastern (2M) (Figure 3). 35 participants reported pursuing undergraduate studies and 14 postgraduate studies. 6 participants either finished their studies with MSc or PhD degrees, and were currently working at the universities as post-docs (2), research scientists (2), software engineers (2)

I would describe the study size and composition as a limitation, and a reason to pursue a larger and more diverse study for confirmation (or lack thereof), rather than a reason to expect an "uphill battle" for replication and so forth.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#45
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think developers who use "AI" coding assistants are putting their careers at risk.

fighter jet pilots who use the ejection seat are putting their careers at risk, but so are the ones who don't use it when they should.

>F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before fighter jet crashed in Alaska

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/alaska-f-35-crash-acci...

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#46
Everyone is different. I don’t have a good grasp on the distribution of HN readers these days but I know for myself as a heavy user of LLMs, I am not sold on this for myself. I am asking more questions than ever. I use it for proof reading and editing. But I can see the risk as a software engineer. I really appreciate tools like cursor, I give it bite size chunks and review. Using tools like Claude code though. It becomes a black box and I no longer feel at the helm of the ship. I could see if you outsourced all thinking to an LLM there can be consequences. That said I am not sold on the paper and suspects it’s mostly hyperbole.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#47
post #20

A few things to note. 1. This is arxiv - before publication or peer review. Grain of salt.[0] 2. 18 participants per cohort 3. 54 participants total Given the low N and the likelihood that this is drawn from 18-22 year olds attending MIT, one should expect an uphill battle for replication and for generalizability. Further, they are brain scanning during the experiment, which is an uncomfortable/out-of-the-norm experi…

Yeah my bullshit detector is going off even more than when I use ChatGPT...

4. This is clickbait research, so it's automatically less likely to be true.

5. They are touting obvious things as if they are surprising, like the fact that you're less likely to remember an essay that you got something else to write, or that the ChatGPT essays were verbose and superficial.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#48
post #34

there's going to be an avalanche of dementia for the generations that outsource all their thinking to LLMs

IMO that is a misuse of LLMs. You are not supposed to outsource your thinking. You need to be part of the whole process, incl. the architectural design. I am, and I got far with LLMs (Claude mostly, not much with GPT). I use GPT for personal stuff or ramblings, not for coding.

There will always be people who misuse something, but we should not hurt those who do not. Same with drugs. There are functional junkies who know when to stop, go on a tolerance break, take just enough of a dose and so forth, vs. the irresponsible ones. The situation is quite similar and I do not want AI to be "banned" (assuming it could) because of people who misuse LLMs.

People, let us have nice things.

As for the article... did they not say the same thing about search engines and Wikipedia? Do you remember how cheating actually helps us learn (by writing down the things you want to cheat)? Problem is, people do not even bother reading the output of the LLM and that is on them.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#49
post #7

That explains a lot of Hacker News lately. /s Like everything else in our life, cognition is "use it or lose it". Oursourcing your decision making and critical thinking to a fancy autocomplete with sycopantic tendencies and incapable of reasoning sure is fun, but as the study found, it has its downsides.

To be fair, a lot of commenters on HN were demonstrably suffering the effects of cognitive decline for years before LLMs.

Re: MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

#50
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think developers who use "AI" coding assistants are putting their careers at risk.

And here I'm wondering if I'm putting my career at risk by not trying them out. Probably both are true: you should try them out and then use them where they are useful, not for everything.

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