Your Brain on AI
“AI is now embedded in so many products that it’s impossible to isolate how it is shaping us,” Beth McMurtrie reports in her Chronicle of Higher Education article The Student Brain on AI. An MIT Media Lab study, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” did not confirm fears of “brain rot” but showed a more subtle shift: students writing with AI leaned toward homogenous ideas, equating happiness with career success. Other research points to the same divide. When AI acts as a tutor, prompting reflection and asking questions, learning deepens. When used as a shortcut, it weakens understanding and inflates confidence. The real concern is not memory loss but the erosion of curiosity, debate, and discovery in the classroom.
Sir Edward John Poynter, The Ionian Dance, 1895. Public domain.