In a recent CNN interview, MIT's Dr. Nataliya Kosmyna shared findings from a new study showing that relying solely on AI for tasks like writing can reduce brain activity and memory. The research highlights how overusing AI tools like ChatGPT may impact how we think—and why human effort still matters.

Omar Jimenez, on The Brief with Jim Sciutto 

Transcript

OMAR JIMENEZ:  Meanwhile, a new study from MIT is raising the alarm about how A.I. impacts learning and how convenience could come at a cost for your brain. The study looked at essay writing across three groups, people using AI, a search engine, or just their own brain power. That last group, no tools at all, showed the strongest brain activity plus better memory recall. They were followed by the search engine users and in last place, people relying on AI.

Now, as students and workers become more and more dependent on tools like ChatGPT, it does raise a lot of questions about the future of how we think.

Joining me now is Nataliya Kosmyna lead author on the study. Thank you for being here. Can you just explain what you learned from this study? Did it surprise you?

NATALIYA KOSMYNA, LEAD STUDY AUTHOR AND RESEARCH SCIENTIST, MIT: Yes, absolutely. So grateful to be here with you. Thank you also for the summarization, that was great, but very important details that you missed, which is actually super interesting is additional session we performed with those participants.

We actually reassigned them in the very end, towards the final session. So, if you were, Omar, my participant, and you had done LLM group for three sessions, for the final session, I actually assign you to the brain only group, or opposite, if you are only writing your essays with your brain, so brain, brain, brain, with your final session, I actually would reassign you to LLM group.

And so, what happens there is very interesting. Those folks who were LLM, LLM, LLM, and then use their brain to write an essay actually showed weaker neural connectivity compared to brain only folks. And those who first use the brain, so, brain, brain, brain, then you use LLM, actually showed high neural connectivity.

Among other things that we learned about ownership of essays, did they consider those essays their own? What actually neural connectivity means is, in layman terms, like you have right now me. If I would—were in the room right now next to you and we had your producer next to us, your producer would talk to you, I would—then you would talk to me. I would tell you something back. So, we actually see who talks to who in the brain and how much talking is happening. That's what we learned.

I appreciate that you didn't say brain rot, stupid, dumb because we saw a lot of those. So, please, please, please do not use this vocabulary. So, thank you so much. Really important that its impact.