Khaberni - Growing research indicates that the more you use artificial intelligence, the greater its negative impact on your critical thinking skills. However, it depends on the tasks you use it for and how you use it. A recent exciting experiment explored the extent of the impact of using artificial intelligence programs on electrical activity within the brain.
Since November 2022, when the smart chatbot "ChatGPT" was launched, the impact of artificial intelligence on many people's lives has grown.
Therefore, researchers are delving into the impact of artificial intelligence on our brains. Preliminary research results at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have revealed a potentially interesting connection.
The cognitive debt of artificial intelligence
One of these studies was titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT: The Accumulation of Cognitive Debt from Using Artificial Intelligence in Writing Articles".
According to "Healthline", this study included 54 individuals aged between 18 and 39, who were asked to write 4 articles over 4 months using "ChatGPT" or a search engine like Google or Yahoo.
One group was assigned to rely only on their brains for writing the articles, without any assistance from any electronic program.
The participants' brains were monitored while writing the first 3 articles, to assess the extent of electrical connectivity within the brain.
The researchers found that the electrical connectivity in the brains of the "ChatGPT" group was less than in the other two groups. It was also lower in the search engine group than in the brain-only group.
The fourth and final article involved switching the groups. The brain-only group used "".
Results of the experiment
The group that switched from using "ChatGPT" to their own brains showed the following:
• Significantly less electrical connectivity in their brains compared to the 3rd session of the brain-only group.
• Decreased perception of writing ownership.
• Less recall of quotations from the article they wrote.
And the researchers at MIT weren't the only ones investigating this phenomenon.
A study conducted earlier this year on the use of artificial intelligence and critical thinking skills found that those who use it frequently, mostly aged between 17 and 25, may suffer from a decrease in critical thinking abilities.
Another study conducted in 2025 suggested that the use of artificial intelligence might transform aspects of active critical thinking into a more passive understanding in 3 ways:
• Recall and Understanding: From gathering information to verifying it.
• Application: From solving problems to integrating responses from artificial intelligence.
• Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation: From performing tasks to managing them.
