Reclaim Your Brain.

 

A Girl Writing
Henriette Brown (1829-1901)
Photo Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum London 

Imagine for a moment you are a child in 1941, sitting the common entrance exam for public schools with nothing but a pencil and paper. You read the following: "Write for no more than a quarter of an hour, about a British author".

Today, most of us wouldn't need 15 minutes to ponder such a question. We'd get the answer instantly by turning to AI tools such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Siri. Offloading cognitive effort to artificial intelligence has become second nature, but with mounting evidence that human intelligence is declining, some experts fear this impulse is driving the trend...

One of our most vital cognitive skills at risk is critical thinking. Why consider what you admire about a British author when you can get ChatGPT to reflect on that for you?

Research underscores these concerns. Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School in Kloten, Switzerland, tested 666 people in the UK and found a significant correlation between frequent AI use and lower critical-thinking skills - with younger participants who showed higher dependence on AI tools scoring lower in critical thinking compared with older adults.

Similarly, a study by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania surveyed 319 people in professions that use GenAI at least once a week. While it improved their efficiency, it also inhibited critical thinking and fostered long-term overreliance on the technology, which the researchers predict in a diminished ability to solve problems without AI support...

This erosion of critical thinking is compounded by the AI-driven algorithms that dictate what we see on social media. "The impact of social media on critical thinking is enormous," says Gerlich. "To get your video seen, you have four seconds to capture someone's attention." The result? A flood of bite-size messages that are easily digested but don't encourage critical thinking. "It gives you information that you don't have to process any further," says Gerlich.

Thoughtful
Eduardo Tofano (1838-1920)
Photo Credit: Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum [CC  BY-NC-ND] 

By being served information rather than acquiring that knowledge through cognitive effort, the ability to critically analyse the meaning, impact, ethics and accuracy of what you have learned is easily neglected in the wake of what appears to be a quick and perfect answer. "To be critical of AI is difficult - you have to be disciplined. It is very challenging not to offload your critical thinking to these machines," says Gerlich.

Wendy Johnson, who studies intelligence at Edinburgh University, sees this in her students every day. She emphasises that it is not something she has tested empirically but believes that students are ready to to substitute independent thinking with letting the internet tell them what to do do and believe.

Without critical thinking, it is difficult to ensure that we consume AI-generated content wisely. It may appear credible, particularly as you become more dependent on it...

As Sternberg warns, [a psychologist at Cornell University] we need to stop asking what AI can do for us and start asking what what it is doing to us. Until we know for sure, the answer, according to Gerlich, is to "train humans to be more human again using critical thinking, intuition - the things that computers can't yet do and where we can add real value."

We can't expect the big tech companies to help us do this, he says. "So it needs to start in schools," says Gerlich. "AI is here to stay. We have to interact with it, so we  need to learn how to do that in the right way." If we don't, we won't just make ourselves redundant but our cognitive abilities too.

(Helen Thomson, The Observer, 2025)

Research underscores these concerns. These are very small surveys so much more needs to be done in this area.

Wendy Johnson...believes that students are ready to to substitute independent thinking with letting the internet tell them what to do do and believe. This is very disturbing. One of the most important features of a university education is to nurture and further develop critical thinking skills that should have started in a student's primary and secondary schools.

We can't expect the big tech companies to help us do this - These high tech companies are first and foremost driven by the profit motive. That is their primary concern.