09/01/2026
🧠 Is ChatGPT making writing easier… but thinking weaker?
A study from the MIT Media Lab explored what happens in the brain when people write essays using AI.
Researchers studied 54 participants writing with:
🤖 an LLM like ChatGPT
🔎 a search engine
🧠 no external tools
Using EEG measurements, they found that participants writing without AI showed the strongest and most widely distributed brain connectivity, while the LLM group showed the weakest overall connectivity during the task.
Even more interesting: people using an LLM had more difficulty accurately quoting what they had just written.
But there’s an important detail 👇
You may have seen viral claims that ChatGPT causes a “47% drop in brain activity.” That’s misleading.
The study measured differences in specific patterns of EEG connectivity — it did NOT show that ChatGPT damages your brain by 47%.
The researchers also emphasize that the findings are preliminary and specific to this type of essay-writing task. They shouldn’t automatically be applied to every way we use AI.
The bigger question may not be whether we should use AI — but how we use it.
💡 AI can remove friction from thinking. But if it starts replacing too much of the thinking itself, could there be a cognitive cost?
What do you think? 💭
Tag someone who should see this. 👀
ℹ️ Sources:
MIT Media Lab (2025) — Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
Kosmyna et al. (2025) — EEG study comparing LLM, search-engine, and brain-only essay writing
MIT Media Lab (2026) — Research overview on AI, cognition, attention, memory, and engagement