Does ChatGPT Make People Dumber? MIT Study Reveals Brain Activity Drop
MIT study reveals AI writing tools reduce brain activity and cognitive engagement. Learn how ChatGPT affects thinking, memory, and creativity in students.
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Will Long-term Reliance on AI Writing Make Our Brains Duller?
MIT's Media Lab conducted such an experiment. In early 2025, a college student sat in MIT's Media Lab, wearing a complex electroencephalogram (EEG) helmet with silver-gray neural electrodes wrapped around his head, and 32 cooling gel points precisely fitted to his scalp.
A laptop computer was placed in front of him. Over the next 20 minutes, he needed to select one topic from a set of actual SAT writing prompts and compose a short essay.
During this time, he could ask questions to ChatGPT displayed on the computer screen, but was prohibited from using other software, while the EEG device on his head would precisely record his brainwaves throughout the examination process.
Under the coordination of research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna's team at MIT's Media Lab, a total of 54 college students from Harvard, MIT, and Tufts successively participated in this writing experiment.
Combining technologies such as EEG neuroimaging and NLP analysis, AI-assisted writing was, for the first time, placed under a microscope, becoming quantifiable and analyzable behavior.
The summary is as follows:
Long-term reliance on AI writing leads to further decreased brain activity; after stopping AI use, reactions become slower, and language organization abilities decline in the short term
Performance with search engine-assisted writing ranked in the middle, with higher satisfaction and sense of ownership, and clearer organization
Independent brain writing can stimulate higher cognitive processing, with the strongest sense of writing ownership; activity actually increased after using GPT-4o