Is artificial intelligence rotting our brains?
Is artificial intelligence rotting our brains?
https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/31657
Publish Date: 2026-06-12 07:00:00
Source Domain: www.varsity.co.uk
To claim that ‘AI is making us stupider’ is an inaccurate way of summarising what we currently understand about how generative AI use influences our brain healthLyra Browning for Varsity
At the very beginning of the academic year, the University of Cambridge announced that students are now permitted to use AI tools in order to “support personal study, research, and formative work”. Nowhere has this change been more apparent than in our libraries – in any given study space, it’s likely that ChatGPT will be open on at least one laptop screen. As more students increasingly rely on the use of generative AI to write elaborate supervision essays and complex Python scripts, does this new guidance throw into question the ideology that ‘degrees make us smarter’, especially as less of our work becomes authentically our own? Is there anything science can tell us about the potentially detrimental effects of AI use on our brains, or are we jumping to false conclusions too soon?
One particularly common motivation among students for using AI is to seek help with writing the occasional supervision essay. Researchers from MIT set out to understand the effects of using AI on our brains by comparing the brain activity of people who wrote essays using either ChatGPT, traditional search engines, or no online tools. Those who used ChatGPT to write their essays displayed fewer, weaker connections between different parts of their brains, highlighting how using AI can influence the brains’ underlying architecture. Moreover, the writers who used ChatGPT found it much more difficult to quote their essays correctly, if they could even quote them at all, unlike those who used traditional search engines or no online tools.
“Those who used ChatGPT to write their essays displayed fewer, weaker connections between different parts of their brains”
Throughout the process of writing an essay or studying for an exam, the hippocampus – a small,…
