MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

Posted by cainxinth 9/3/2025

MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline(publichealthpolicyjournal.com)

615 points | 566 commentspage 6

hoppp 9/3/2025|

Chatting with vibe coders on reddit, I can definitely tell.. although my hunch is that a lot of people "not smart" enough to learn to program will be entering the field calling themselves programmers.

I think maybe they are project managers since the programming is outsourced to Ai, but the idea don't seem to catch on there

wslh 9/3/2025||

Calculators either? [1]. To be fair, we can find articles in favor and against the same tool.

[1] https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S136...

gandalfgeek 9/3/2025||

The title of the study is provocatively framed and the actual findings don't live up to it. I made a short video explaining it-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDCi0VwyiQ

grim_io 9/3/2025||

I have never used LLM's to write essays, so I can't comment on that.

What I can comment on is how valuable and energizing it is for me to cooperatively code with LLM's using agents.

I find it sad to hear when someone finds this experience disappointing, and I wonder what could go wrong to make it so.

grugagag 9/3/2025|

I don’t thik someone finds this experience dissapointing but harmful for cognition, probably in the long run as the cognition ‘muscle’ athrophies in some regions as I see it. Remains to be seen how it pans out. However, how much would you be willing to pay for LLMs before you decide it’s not worth it? It is unexpensive at this stage but this won’t last.

grim_io 9/3/2025||

Unless they get Thanos snapped out of existence, I would probably just switch to inferior local models.

Going back to pre-LLM is not an option for me. Not because I can't, but because I don't want to.

How are you people using AI? I still have to think a lot. The biggest change is that I don't run around in circles trying to fix annoying bugs.

lif 9/3/2025||

What are the costs of convenience? Surely most LLM use by consumers leans into that heavily.

rekrsiv 9/3/2025||

I believe this is true for literally anything that replaces practice. We're meant to build muscle memory for things through repetition, but if we sidestep the repetition by farming it out to another process, we never build muscle memory.

blackqueeriroh 9/3/2025|

Data doesn’t support it

rekrsiv 9/3/2025||

Feel free to point to said data.

vonneumannstan 9/3/2025||

No different than Socrates complaining about students using writing ruining their memory.

siliconc0w 9/3/2025||

Isn't it obvious that you use your brain less to generate an essay with AI vs writing it manually?

I think what you'd want to measure is someone completing a task manually and someone completing n times the tasks with a copilot.

CuriouslyC 9/3/2025||

This does not mesh with my personal experience. I find that AI reduces task noise that prevents me from getting in the flow of high level creative/strategic thinking. I can just plan algorithms/models/architectures and very quickly validate, test, iterate and always work at a high level while the AI handles syntax and arcane build processes.

Maybe it's my natural ADHD tendencies, but having that implementation/process noise removed from my workflow has been transformational. I joke about having gone super saiyan, but it's for real. In the last month, I've gotten 3 papers in pre-print ready state, I'm working on a new model architecture that I'm about to test on ARC-AGI, and I've gotten ~20 projects to initial release or very close (several of which concretely advance SOTA).

jugg1es 9/3/2025|

All of the nay-sayers in the comments here are thinking about this from the POV of a person who reached intellectual maturity without LLMs and now use it as a force multiplier, and rightly so.

However, I think that take is too short-sighted and doesn't take into account the effect that these products have on minds that have not yet reached maturity. What happens when you've been using ChatGPT since grade school and have effectively offloaded all the hard stuff to AI through college? Those people won't be using it as a force multiplier - they will be using it to perform basic tasks. Ray-Ban sells glasses now with LLMs built in with a camera and microphone so you can constantly interact with it all day. What happens when everyone has one of these devices and use it for everything?

tuesdaynight 9/3/2025|

I believe that they will solve problems in different ways, just like we solve problems different from our ancestors because of the internet.

jugg1es 9/4/2025||

I wish I shared your optimism

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