Cognitive Surrender: LLMs and Their Long-Term Impacts on Brain Health

The applied intelligence alternative that puts human thinking and well-being at the forefront of our lives

We are facing an invisible surrender of our cognition with the overuse of AI, which might be making us faster but not better. AI hype has effectively been able to reframe outsourcing thinking as progress, where doing less of it is seen as efficiency, and where automation feels inevitable. Over time, this creates a blind spot, and people don’t realize what they’re giving up until they’ve already become dependent. Where we lose our ability to question, challenge and think for ourselves. We need an alternative that provides us with the benefits of advanced technology but not its harm, one that helps maximize human cognition, not diminish it. Helping to enhance our well-being.

As large language models take over more cognitive tasks, researchers are warning that mental outsourcing comes with a high human cost. The findings tell us that if we become too reliant on AI, it can affect the language we use, our ability to do basic cognitive tasks, and our behaviour and happiness.

There is a growing body of research that suggests that this "cognitive offloading" to AI has a corrosive effect on our mental abilities, increasingly contributing to cognitive decline. Notably, MIT's research by Nataliya Kosmyna, Ph.D that "ChatGPT-dependent users showed less brain activity, reduced by up to 55%." 

More studies show that young people are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of AI on key cognitive skills like critical thinking. Further, as we outsource even more of our thinking to LLMs and other forms of AI, the effects on our memories and ability to solve basic problems are getting worse.

AI tools used by students to write essays, for example, come at great costs, not only to students but to our economy as well. We’re building a generation of underperformers, which doesn't bode well for the future of discovery, which is what advances our world. Instead, we risk raising a generation of entirely stupid people.

MIT Media Lab recruited 54 students to write short essays and split them into three groups. One was instructed to use ChatGPT. A second could use Google search, with AI-generated summaries turned off. The third used no technology, just their brain, and students' brainwaves were measured while they worked.

• The essay topics were deliberately open-ended, meaning little research was needed for the task, with prompts including questions around loyalty, happiness, or our daily life choices. 

• Those who used their own minds had a brain that was "on fire", showing widespread activity across many parts of the brain,

• The search engine-only group still showed strong activity in the visual parts of the brain, but the ChatGPT group showed notably less brain activity – it was reduced by up to 55%. "There was much less activation in the areas corresponding to creativity and to processing information."

After submitting their essays, students in the AI group were unable to quote from their essays and felt they had no ownership over their work. Pointing to an overuse of AI can cause people become less able to retain and recall information when they use AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.

Cognitive Surrender

A study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that some people undergo something they term "cognitive surrender" when using generative AI chatbots. This means they tend to accept what the AI tells them with minimal scrutiny and even allow it to override their own intuition, creating an invisible and harmful surrender of the mind.

Even more concerning, and frankly scary, a recent multinational study team found that medical professionals who used an AI tool to screen for colon cancer for three months were subsequently worse at spotting the tumours without it. 

Generally, research indicates significant negatives (there are good things too) of AI in medicine, including perpetuating demographic biases, misdiagnosis risks due to unvalidated data, data privacy breaches, and diminished human empathy in care. All of which can causing doctors not only to lose clinical skills, but human or bedside manor skills.

Particularly dangerous is the use of AI chatbots for advice in mental health! There are some things that AI just shouldn't be involved with.

Effectively, outsourcing to “AI-everything” risks losing much of what makes us human, which includes our creativity that produces original work.

Essays that students wrote, aided by LLM based products, like ChatGPT and Claude, all look very similar. One teacher described students' work as "soulless", lacking originality and depth, MIT's Nataliya Kosmyna said. 

LLMs can be a useful tool, for a quick search and summarizations generally, but outsourcing your thinking has significant worrisome effects on mental acuity and your ability to process information effectively, over the long-term.

It compromises our sharpness and ability to perform mental tasks well, says computational neuroscientist Vivienne Ming, author of Robot Proof. Her concern is that the more people are becoming addicted to LLM models. Taking from her research: she asked a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, to predict real-world outcomes, such as the price of oil.  The majority of participants simply asked AI and copied the answer. 

Ming measured their brains’ gamma-wave activity – a marker of cognitive effort and found very little activation. Worrying her about the long-term implications, not only for the students but for society as a whole—we are effectively producing a generation of non-thinkers and low performers? A generation of superfluous people.  

"That's really worrying," Ming says. "If that is a natural mode for people to interact with these systems – and these are smart kids – that's bad." Deep thinking, she says, is our "superpower." "If we don't use it, the long-term implications for cognitive health are pretty strong.” Reliance on LLMs requires very little cognitive effort, she adds, which is exactly what's needed for a healthy brain.

A small subset of participants, less than 10%, worked differently, using AI as a tool only to gather data; and did the analysis themselves. These individuals' predictions were more accurate and more coherent than those of other participants and showed much stronger brain activation, too.

LLMs and Long-Term Brain Health

Almost two decades ago, Ming predicted that within 20 to 30 years, there would be a statistically meaningful increase in dementia rates directly related to our overreliance on Google Maps. "I meant it to be provocative,” she says. But "If you don't have to think about navigating, then there'll be some detectable effect.”

While Ming’s prediction was not supported by data at the time, the increased use of GPS has been linked to worse spatial memory over time, according to one study of 13 people conducted over three years. Poor spatial navigation may be a potential predictor of Alzheimer's Disease. This occurs because spatial navigation relies heavily on the entorhinal cortex, one of the very first brain regions affected by Alzheimer's pathology. 

The main point here is commonsensical: the more active our brain (and body) is, the better protected it is from cognitive decline. LLM overuse, overreliance, or addiction not only reduces brain creativity but also likely harms our cognition and potentially increases the risk of dementia, the research is suggesting.

Your definitely not getting smarter, just taking more risk with your brain health.

Common sense should and our instinct for self-preservation, should tell us that if we become dependent on AI use, we are effectively surrender our cognition, and our humanity!  

The applied intelligence path forward

The objective of applied intelligence is not to create a binary choice: “use AI” or “not use AI,”  but to offer a human-centric alternative that puts human thinking and well-being at the forefront of our lives. 

The applied intelligence  thinking framework is built on formal logic, deductive reasoning, a sequential step-by-step process underpinned with structure and premise. This is unlike LLM-based models like ChatGPT, which are built on the fallacy of informal logic or reasoning, where no rules of deductive logic apply.

For 6ai Technologies, we see a future lies in brilliant people working with brilliant decisioning systems—a thought partner helping us process information through structure, more effectively than if one had to do it themselves.

By challenging our own thinking through the applied intelligence Socratic method, we can learn better and faster to acquire authentic knowledge more robustly and healthier.

Professor Ming recommends using AI as your "nemesis prompt,” to "challenge your own thinking…forcing you to defend and refine your arguments rather than simply accepting the answers it provides,”  which is exactly what the 6ai six-step process does. The applied intelligence process prioritizes productive thinking friction, to ask more and better questions and to gather context, rather than just supplying quick but hollow answers that infantilizes our minds and warps humanity. 

6ai allows for clarity, leading to better decision-making and strategy outcomes, which is the intellectual edge most are looking for to effectively compete and win in the 21st-century. 

It is true what they say: there are no shortcuts to greatness, and that goes for cognitive shortcuts too. 6ai is for serious people who want to run their own lives with agency!

Clearly, for long-term brain health, we need to continue to challenge ourselves, says Kosmyna, because "Our minds, creativity and cognitive health will benefit in the process.”