MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by mzajc » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

dpkirchner wrote: post #283

mzajc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ask follow up questions to make sure I understand why the AI's answer works. I've tried a similar approach and found it very prone to hallucination[0]. I tend to google things first and ask a LLM as fallback, so maybe it's not a fair comparison, but what do I need a LLM for if a search engine can answer my question. [0]: Just the other day I asked ChatGPT what a colonn (':') after systemd's ExecStart= means. The…

Could you give an example of an ExecStart line that uses a colon? I haven't found any documentation for that while using Google and I don't have examples of it in my systemd unit files.

Yup, it's undocumented for some reason. I don't remember where I saw it used, but as an example

  [Service]
  ExecStart=/bin/echo $PATH

Will log the environment variable, while

  [Service]
  ExecStart=:/bin/echo $PATH

Will log literal $PATH.

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

#452

Post by darajava » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

I'm really not advocating for people to push out reams of AI drivel and not learn anything while doing it, but of these three groups which ones are likely to be the most effective?

The ability to easily edit in word processors surely atrophied people's ability to really reason out what they wanted to write before committing it to paper. Is it sad that these traits are less readily available in the human populace? Sure. Do we still use word processors anyway because of the tremendous benefits they have? Of course. Similar could be said for spellcheckers, tractors, calculators, power tools, etc.

With LLMs, it's so much quicker to access a tremendous breadth of information, as well as drill down and get a pretty good depth on a lot of things too. We lose some things by doing it this way, and it can certainly be very misused (usually in a fairly embarrassing way). We need to keep it human, but AI is here to stay and I think the benefits far exceed the "cognitive decline" as mentioned in this journal.

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

#453

Post by mzajc » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #290

mzajc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ask follow up questions to make sure I understand why the AI's answer works. I've tried a similar approach and found it very prone to hallucination[0]. I tend to google things first and ask a LLM as fallback, so maybe it's not a fair comparison, but what do I need a LLM for if a search engine can answer my question. [0]: Just the other day I asked ChatGPT what a colonn (':') after systemd's ExecStart= means. The…

Does it work better when the AI is instructed to describe a method of answering the question, instead of answering the question directly? For example, in this specific case, I am enough of a domain expert to know that this information is accessible by running `man systemd.service` and looking for the description of command line syntax (findable with grep for "ExecStart=", or, as I have now seen in preparing this answ…

That's a much better option since the LLM is no longer the source of truth. Unfortunately, it only works in cases where the feature is properly documented, which isn't the case here.

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

#454

Post by PhantomHour » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:20 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #403

PhantomHour wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things. One of the other replies alludes to it, but I want to say it explicitly: The key difference is that you can generall…

I don't follow; you can read the code that your LLM produces as well. It's way easier to drill down in this way than the bytecode/assembly vs. high-level language divide.

The distinction is that you cannot make the LLM do the drilling. And the way these tools are designed is to train the user to use the LLM rather than their own brain, so they'll never learn it themselves.

A big problem with the "Just read the code" approach is that reading the code at the level deep enough to truly understand it is at minimum equally time-consuming than writing the code in the first place. (And in practice tends to be significantly worse) Anyone who claims they're reading the LLM's code output properly is on some level lying to them.

Human brains are simply bad at consistently monitoring output like that, especially if the output is consistently "good", especially especially when the errors appear to be "good" output on the surface level. This is universal across all fields and tools.

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

#455

Post by NapGod » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:22 PM UTC

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #211

This is a bad and sloppy regurgitation of a previous (and more original) source[1] and the headline and article explicitly ignore the paper authors' plea[2] to avoid using the paper to try to draw the exact conclusions this article saying the paper draws. The comments (some, not all) are also a great example of how cognitive bias can cause folks to accept information without doing a lot of due diligence into the actu…

yea it's clear no one is actually reading the paper. the study showed the group who used LLMs for the first three sessions then had to do session 4 without them had lower brain connectivity than was recorded for session 3 with all the groups showing some kind of increase from one session to the next. Importantly, this group's brain connectivity didn't reset to the session 1 levels, but somewhere in-between. They were still learning and getting better at the essay writing task. In session 4 they effectively had part of the brain network they were using for the task taken away, so obviously there's a dip in performance. None of this says anyone got dumber. The philosophical concept of the Extended Mind is key here.

imo the most interesting result is that the brains of the group that had done sessions 1-3 without the search engine or LLM aids lit up like christmas trees in session 4 when they were given LLMs to use, and that's what the paper's conclusions really focus on.

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

#456

Post by nitwit005 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #281

goalieca wrote: post #164

Anecdote here, but when I was in grad school, I was talking to a PhD student i respected a lot. Whenever he read a paper, he would try to write the code out and get it working. I would take a couple of months but he could whip it up in a few days. He explained to me that it was just practice and the more you practice the better you become. He not only coded things quickly, he started analyzing papers quicker too and…

Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things. If you stop thinking, then of course you will learn less. If instead you think about the next level of abstraction up,…

I'd caution that the people not familiar with working at the low level are often missing a bunch of associated knowledge which is useful in the day to day.

You run into Python/Javascript/etc programers who have no concept of what operations might execute quickly or slowly. There isn't a mental model of what the interpreter is doing.

We're often insulated from the problem because the older generation often used fairly low level languages on very limited computers, and remember lessons from that era. That's not true of younger developers.

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

#457

Post by jbstack » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:25 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #424

jbstack wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've experienced cognitive decline when using AI tools a bit too much to help solve programming-related problems. When dealing with an unfamiliar programming ecosystem it feels so easy and magical to just keep copy / pasting error outputs until the problem is resolved. Previously solving the problem would've taken me longer but I would've also learned a lot more. I've had the opposite experience, but my approach is…

I think the school experience proves that doesn’t work. Reminds me of a teacher carefully breaking down the problem on the board and you nodding along when it is unfolding in front of you in a directed manner. The question is if you can do it yourself come the exam. If all you did to prepare is watch the teacher solve it, with no attempt to solve it from scratch yourself during practice, you will fail the exam.

That very much depends on the topic being studied. I've passed plenty of exams of different levels (school, university, professional qualifications) just by reading the textbook and memorising key facts. I'd agree with you if we are talking about something like maths.

Also, there's a huge difference between passively watching a teacher write an explanation on a board, and interactively quizzing the teacher (or in this case, LLM) in order to gain a deeper and personalised understanding.

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

#458

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:32 PM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #396

matt_kantor wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could , but you're commenting on a study whose results indicate that this isn't what happens.

And you are in a comment chain discussing how there is a subset of people where the study is not true.

Rather a subset of people who would like to believe the results don't apply to them.

Frankly, I'm sure there will be much more studies in this direction. Now this is a university, an independent organization. But, given the amount of money involved, some of future studies will come from the camp vitally interested in people believing that by outsourcing their work to coding agents they are becoming smarter instead of losing achieved skills. Looking forward to reading the first of these.

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

#459

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #228

CuriouslyC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're just moving up the abstraction ladder, like we did with compilers. I don't care about the individual lines of code, I care about architecture, code structure, rigorous automated e2e tests, contracts with comprehensive validation, etc. Rather than waste a bunch of time pouring over agent PRs I just make them jump over extremely high static/analytic hurdles that guarantee functionality, then my only job is to ide…

As the other comment said, LLMs are not an abstraction. An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. This allows the consumer to rely on the abstraction. This reliance frees up the consumer from having to implement the A->B, thus allowing it to move up the ladder. LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the consumer is neve…

Human developers by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the manager is never really sure if the developer solved the problem, or if they introduced some bugs, or if their solution is robust and ideal even when it seems to be working.

All of which is beside the point, because soon-ish LLMs are going to develop their own equivalents of experimentation, formalisation of knowledge, and collective memory, and then solutions will become standardised and replicable - likely with a paradoxical combination of a huge loss of complexity and solution spaces that are humanly incomprehensible.

The arguments here are like watching carpenters arguing that a steam engine can't possibly build a table as well as they can.

Which - is you know - true. But that wasn't how industrialisation worked out.

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

#460

Post by stocksinsmocks » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:39 PM UTC

rf15 wrote: post #353

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(3) people who never had that capability. Remember we aren’t all above average. You shouldn’t worry. Now that we have widespread literacy, nobody needs to and few even could recite Norse Sagas or the Illiad from memory. Basically nobody has useful skills for nomadic survival. We’re about to move on to more interesting problems, and our collective abilities and motivation will still be stratified as it always has been…

I don't think it's down to ability, I think it's down to the decision not to learn itself. And that scares me.

Let them.

-Your Friend Mel (probably)