The skills you don't notice losing
What the research actually says about handing our thinking to tools, minus the panic.
Psychologists have a name for using tools to do mental work for us: cognitive offloading. We've always done it. Writing things down is offloading, and so is a calendar. Mostly it's a great deal: you free your mind for the things that matter.
But there's a catch, and you can see it in something as ordinary as GPS. In one study, people who relied more on GPS over the years had worse spatial memory when they had to find their way without it. The tool didn't break anything. The skill just stopped getting practice.
The question now is what happens when the thing we offload isn't directions, but thinking itself.
What the studies are finding
The research is young, and it's worth reading carefully. Here's where it stands.
- More offloading, less critical thinking. A 2025 study of 666 people found that heavier use of AI tools was linked to lower critical-thinking scores, with offloading explaining much of the link. It's a correlation, not proof of cause, but it points the same way as other work.
- Trusting the tool, thinking less. Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon surveyed 319 knowledge workers about 936 real tasks. The more people trusted AI to handle a task, the less critical thinking they reported doing. The more they trusted themselves, the more they did.
- Better homework, worse exams. In a field experiment with nearly 1,000 high-school math students, students given open access to GPT-4 did much better on practice problems, then scored worse than students who never had it once it was taken away. A version designed as a tutor, which gave hints instead of answers, largely avoided the harm.
- Quieter brains, fuzzier memories. An MIT Media Lab study measured the brain activity of people writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed the weakest brain connectivity, and many struggled to quote a single sentence from essays they'd just written. It's an early, small study (54 people) that hasn't been peer-reviewed, and other researchers have questioned its methods, so treat it as a signal, not a verdict.
What it adds up to
Not "AI is rotting your brain." The honest version is smaller and more useful: skills you don't use get weaker, and AI makes it very easy not to use some important ones. The math study points to the encouraging part too. The tool that made students think for themselves didn't do the damage. How you use AI matters.
Keeping the skill
The fix isn't to give up the tools. It's to keep doing some of the work yourself, on purpose, the way someone with a car still takes the stairs.
That's the idea behind DidRead. Each day you read a short passage and do the thinking yourself: find the evidence, notice the hidden motive, spot the flawed argument, put an idea in your own words. Then AI reacts to your work, rather than doing it for you.
Five minutes of thinking for yourself won't undo the internet. But it keeps the skill getting its reps.