ChatGPT impairs memory and persistently suppresses brain activity—raising urgent concerns about cognitive offloading and long-term neural harm.
A new MIT study titled, Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, has found that using ChatGPT to help write essays leads to long-term cognitive harm—measurable through EEG brain scans. Students who repeatedly relied on ChatGPT showed weakened neural connectivity, impaired memory recall, and diminished sense of ownership over their own writing. While the AI-generated content often scored well, the brains behind it were shutting down.
The findings are clear: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Grok don’t just help students write—they train the brain to disengage. Here’s what the researchers found: