Article

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

Nataliya Kosmyna and others (MIT Media Lab) · arxiv.org

The EEG study of 54 essay writers, a preprint not yet peer reviewed, which is worth reading past the headlines.

Open on arxiv.org ↗

The question it answers

  1. Does using ChatGPT make you worse at thinking? What does the research actually say?

Read with it

  1. The CHI 2025 survey of 319 knowledge workers linking confidence in AI to less critical thinking. microsoft.com Article The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers Hao-Ping Lee, Advait Sarkar and others (Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon)
  2. A randomised trial showing the same tool can help or hurt learning depending on how people asked it. anthropic.com Article How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic
  3. The field experiment where students did worse once AI was removed, unless the tutor only gave hints. hamsabastani.github.io Article Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani, Alp Sungu and others (University of Pennsylvania)
  4. An analysis of a million student conversations, split between asking for answers and working through problems together. anthropic.com Article Anthropic Education Report: How university students use Claude Anthropic
  5. What the MIT study does and does not show, and the think-first habit that follows from the evidence. oneusefulthing.org Article Against "Brain Damage" Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing)
  6. Reports the Economic Survey's warning, citing MIT and Microsoft, about over-reliance on AI in learning. techcrunch.com Article India is teaching Google how AI in education can scale TechCrunch
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