Scientists Find AI Reduces Human Cognition in Minutes

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Researchers from MIT and UCLA have found that using AI for as little as 10 minutes degrades cognitive function and they think they know why. More interestingly, not everyone is affected by it and it fully depends on how you use AI to answer questions.

[00:00:14]This is really important because AI is already exacerbating what is a literacy crisis and also a crisis of the ability to do math and it's not just impacting the United States, it's impacting everyone. These trends of lowered literacy started in about the '90s and yes, globally.

[00:00:30]There are a lot of theories about why that might be. It may just be the way that we're interacting with technology.

[00:00:35]Children do not read. It could also be the push for standardized testing. But again, the whole world, not just the US.

[00:00:42]Not just this, but AI is being incorporated into curriculums. I teach college classes and textbooks now come with AI assistants.

[00:00:49]Before we ever studied whether or not AI could be helpful, we just integrated it and it may do a disservice to everyone who wants to learn. So, researchers decided to test it.

[00:01:00]They had participants study with AI and they had the ability to use the AI how they wished to answer questions. They could either have it outright do it or they could ask for an explanation. Now, these were pretty simple math questions, although they did do a literacy portion and they had the option of trying to answer or skipping it. And just for fun, I remembered how to do division with fractions. It's 10/9. I'm not going to walk you through fourth grade math, but see if you remember how to do this.

[00:01:27]There are two ways. I tried both of them. Now, the results are really interesting because people were more likely to solve the problems if they didn't have AI even during the pretest where they got to ask AI questions.

[00:01:39]People who did not use AI were more likely to skip questions in the pretest just slightly. You can see those error bars. And in the actual test, yes, not having AI meant that you were much more likely to actually solve the questions.

[00:01:52]This phenomenon did not really extend to the brown dot up there. Those are people who just asked for hints and clarification. Yes, they also did a little bit more poorly than people who did not use AI.

[00:02:05]Researchers have tried to explain the phenomenon because people are using a crutch. You didn't really damage your brain in using AI for 10 minutes, but you didn't bother to learn how to solve the problem yourself. This means that even if you are using artificial intelligence to ask clarifying questions, if you're asking it to explain things, if you're not actually using your brain to do the problem-solving, you are going to degrade your abilities.

[00:02:26]This is a learnable skill called critical thinking, your ability to look at a problem and reason your way through it. If you just look at the answers, it's really not going to help you.

[00:02:36]This could extend to any area of your life. And if you think about that little math problem, I have not had to think about dividing fractions since the fourth grade, but I did at some point learn how to do it. So, the neural connections were there. When we think about children who are now growing up with AI in their curriculum, they are never going to develop those skills.

[00:02:55]Worse, they may never develop thinking skills to take on new problems because AI has always done it for them. This is partially related to the idea of coddling. If a child doesn't succeed the first time, you do it for them, right?

[00:03:09]No, that is bad for their brain development and bad for their long-term skills. People have to struggle.

[00:03:15]This should also not be new information.

[00:03:17]We have kind of known this for a long time. It's just that we have this incredibly powerful tool that we've incorporated into everything.

[00:03:25]We've heard it all, right? People using AI to text their grandparents, people using AI to break up with other human beings, using AI to talk them through their daily routine because they can't do anything without it because they're leaning on this social crutch. This is very likely to degrade your skills that you already have, assuming, you know, you ever developed those skills. And I'm not against AI. I think it's really useful in a variety of ways. One of my favorite things to do with it is to look through a document and look for spelling and grammatical errors and then go and check and see if it's right. Being dyslexic, I find that really useful.

[00:04:00]But I never really could see them prior to AI. So, actually, it's a benefit for a skill I do not have.

[00:04:07]It's also great for pointing out patterns in data or look through this document and look for all duplications or missing numbers and then you can investigate them to make sure that those actually should be there or shouldn't be there. Fantastic uses. What it's not a good use for is to text my mom for me or analyze my ex's text message they clearly sent me at 3:00 a.m.

[00:04:29]I do wish I could tell you that the answer was all things in moderation, but again, 10 minutes. 10 minutes was all it took to degrade people's confidence in solving problems themselves and making them not want to try.

[00:04:42]If the robots ever do rebel, we will probably already be reliant on them and I will also probably be the first person to tell you about it and I'm on their side. Follow me, or