With some MIT colleagues, [Nataliya] Kosmyna set up an experiment … to monitor people’s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity … and less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.
In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there.
Human intelligence is too broad and varied to be reduced to words such as “stupid”, but there are worrying signs that all this digital convenience is costing us dearly.
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Falling test and IQ scores are the subject of hot debate. What is harder to dispute is that, with every technological advance, we deepen our dependence on digital devices and find it harder to work or remember or think or, frankly, function without them.
