How Generative AI Can Rot Your Brain

Years ago, when GPS devices were a new thing, my son, then in college, objected to my use of them. He argued they were a “crutch.” Well, I replied airily, so is a map.

These days, when I’m trying to drive in an unfamiliar area, I’m deeply grateful for GPS, now handily installed on my phone. But, as a recently published paper illuminates, my son had an excellent point. When you read a map, you have to exert some mental effort to figure out how to reach your destination. With GPS, on the other hand, you don’t have to think. It determines your route and tells you what to do at each step.

“Offloading” the cognitive effort of finding your way from Point A to Point B in that way can prevent you from learning the layout of your surroundings—or possibly, as the paper argues, from developing a mental model of how cities are generally laid out. If your phone dies, taking your GPS with it, you’re likely to become disoriented. And if you’re young enough that you’ve never had to read a map because you’ve always had access to GPS, you might not even be able to use one.

The paper, actually a chapter in a forthcoming book, is called “The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI,” and it’s freely available online. It’s the work of a team led by Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering who is adept at explaining the nuances of cognitive neuroscience to laypeople, including teachers. (For the sake of convenience, I’ll just use “Oakley” in connection with the paper, even though there are four other authors. Carl Hendrick has also written about Oakley’s paper on his Substack, The Learning Dispatch.)

As the title suggests, Oakley’s paper isn’t just about the effects of GPS devices. Over the past few decades, we’ve been increasingly relying on a range of external tools like calculators, the internet, and now generative AI to do our thinking for us. Simultaneously, the education system has turned against memorization, dismissing it as inherently “rote,” while prioritizing supposedly abstract critical thinking skills.

As Oakley argues, those skills actually won’t develop in the absence of substantive knowledge. It’s impossible to think critically about a subject you know nothing about. And the more knowledge you have of a subject the better able you are to think