Is AI Helping or Hurting Our Learning? What a New MIT Study Says About ChatGPT and "Cognitive Debt"

AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have swept through our offices, homes and classrooms with the force of a technological hurricane and have become impossible to ignore. And it will come as little surprise that today's "digital natives" (ie. school-aged students) have been among its fastest adopters. AI is being used rightly or wrongly to help students write essays, explain difficult concepts, test our understanding and in some cases, to do our homework for us. It is a powerful assistant, but we’re starting to see signs emerge that relying on it too much might be quietly reshaping how we think - and not always for the better.

A new study from MIT has explored students' brains responded to different levels of AI involvement while completing an essay-writing essays. And the study gives us reason to pause and meaningfully think about the ways in which we are and should be using AI in our learning.

The Rise of AI in Learning

There’s no denying that tools like ChatGPT can make schoolwork, whether that is homework, assignments or assessment preparation, easier to stay on top of and manage. AI offers 24/7 help to brainstorm ideas, breakdown complex subjects,  or even to condense or fact check notes. And students looking for a way to better manage juggling school, revision for upcoming assessments, a looming assignment deadline and extracurricular activities, AI can feel like a shortcut, a lifesaver even, that can make it all manageable.

In fact, many teachers and parents are now encouraging the responsible use of AI as a learning aid. It's true it can save us a lot of time, increase our productivity and offers timely support when we might find ourselves needing it. But at what cost?

What the MIT Study Found

In the study titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT," MIT researchers set out to better understand "the neural and behavioural consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing". To explore this, researchers split 54 participants into three distinct groups and gave them essay writing prompts. The three groups were then permitted to receive varying levels of AI assistance as follows:

1. Group 1 (Brain-only group): This group had to write essays without any outside help from AI.
2. Group 2 (Search engine group): This group could write their essays with the assistance of Google or other traditional online resources.
3. Group 3 (AI group): This group could use ChatGPT to help write their essays.

All participants also wore EEG caps (think swimming caps with wires) to measure their brain activity as they worked so the researchers could track how each approach affected brain function, memory, and the quality of the work produced.

Here’s what they discovered:

• Lower brain activity with AI use
  Participants in the AI group that could use ChatGPT to write their essays showed significantly less brain activity, especially in areas linked to memory, attention, and problem-solving. The data suggested that their brains were doing less cognitive work because the AI was taking on more of the thinking.
• Reduced sense of ownership
  Those who relied on ChatGPT reported feeling less connected to their writing and low authorship of what they had produced. Many had difficulty recalling what they wrote or explaining their thought process, frankly because they didn't have to think through it and didn't make the neural connections that an unassisted brain would have. In contrast, participants who wrote unaided were better able to remember and articulate their ideas, and they reported a stronger sense of authorship.
• Homogenised writing
  Essays created with AI help started to blend together and largely had the same tone and structure. AI assisted writing resulted essays with a banality that the other groups didn't share. This raised concerns about whether students were actively engaging with ideas and the creative process, or were simply adopting the AI polished but generic content.
• Cognitive Debt
  The researchers introduced the idea of “cognitive debt” - a kind of mental cost we may pay if we outsource our thinking to a machine. That is, the idea that if we rely too heavily on AI, we forego the opportunity to engage our minds and practise the deep thinking our brains need to grow - problem-solving, memory, and critical reasoning. The fear then being that over time, we either quietly weaken those core cognitive skills or never develop them.

  This concern would be especially important for teenagers who have been fast adopters of AI. During the teen years, the brain is still developing and refining the pathways that support independent thought, creativity, and decision-making. And if our teenagers hand too much of their thought processes over to AI during this crucial period, there is a concern they miss valuable opportunities to flex those mental muscles.

Acknowledging these cautionary findings, does that mean AI is the enemy? No, far from it. Rather, the study found that if AI is used thoughtfully and in the right way, it can help students reach new heights in their learning. But it’s important to be aware of the trade-offs. Used the wrong way, it risks dulling the very tools we’re trying to sharpen and automating the very thought that makes us human. The key is to make sure AI supports thinking - not replaces it.

The following are just some of the kinds of questions we think are worth pausing on - not just at Learnmate, but around every dinner table and classroom.

The answers to these questions may take years to fully emerge. That’s why, for now, we believe caution should be the order of the day.

Why This Matters for Parents

Although this is a very preliminary study on the effects that AI tools have on the brain, it should be a wake up call for parents. While AI can support learning, too much dependence on it may actually be working against the long-term development of your child’s brain.

• Think of AI like a calculator. We don’t hand one to students on day one. Rather, we teach students how to manually work through problems themselves, including how to break down and understand the problem they are faced with, how to approach it and ultimately how to solve it on their own. Only after that point do we introduce calculators to students. Put another way, we teach them how to think and once that milestone is reached, we provide them a tool - not to replace their thinking - but to speed up the process or help them tackle more complex calculations that would otherwise be too time-consuming or difficult to do by hand.
• AI should be viewed in much the same way. AI is a powerful tool, but if a student turns to it for every task before they have sought to think through it themselves - every essay, summary, or explanation - they might never build the core skills they need to think critically, write clearly, or solve problems independently. If we default to AI for our thinking rather than developing that muscle first, we might lose the ability to critically do so altogether.

What it likely means is that as parents, we need to be mindful of and manage the extent to which our children use AI tools like ChatGPT in the same manner we might purposefully limit their exposure to social media, TV or gaming.

What This Means for Students

If you're a student reading this, our takeaway for you is this: let AI can be your assistant that supports you - it shouldn’t replace you. And if you find yourself feeling inseparable from it, or daunted by the idea of doing an assignment or sitting an exam without it, it might be time to pause and ask whether your balance needs adjusting. See further below for how we suggest using AI in a way that supports your learning, rather than replacing it.

It’s tempting to let ChatGPT do the hard work - to craft your essays, summarise texts, or explain complex ideas. But every time you skip the process of doing it yourself, you're passing up a chance to build the very skills you’ll come to rely on. By all means use it as a tool to save you the time you would otherwise spend on tasks that don't require much thought (ie. organising, condensing or cleaning up your notes or preparing test questions for you on a topic) but try to limit its use for the stuff you should really be thinking through yourself.

Think of your brain as a muscle and development like lifting weights. If someone lifts the weight for you, your muscles don’t grow.

Learnmate's View: Using AI the Smart Way

The MIT study is not saying that AI is bad. Rather, one of its most important insights in that AI can actually improve learning if it is used in the right way. When students used ChatGPT after doing the thinking themselves, their brain activity increased(!) in certain areas.

What that means is that AI shouldn't be used to replace your thinking, but to support it. Think of it like this: 2 + 2 doesn’t always have to equal 4. The sum of your initial critical thinking and the later assistance of AI can together equal 5.

When asked recently about his use of AI, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang reflected that:

"I have to admit, I'm using AI literally every single day. And... I think my cognitive skills are actually advancing."

To achieve that, Huang says that rather than asking the model to think for him:

"I'm asking it to teach me things that I don't know. Or help me solve problems that otherwise wouldn't be able to solve reasonably. [But to] formulate good questions, you have to be thinking, you have to be analytical, you have to be reasoning yourself."

What Jensen Huang is saying mirrors much of the findings from the MIT study; the trick is not to just receive information from AI. It is to prompt it to challenge your thinking, expand your reasoning or test your understanding as opposed to do the work for you.

With Huang's insights in mind, here’s some thoughts from us on how to use it wisely:

• Use it for feedback, not the final product: Write your essay yourself, or frame your essay including your overall contention and paragraph structures, then ask ChatGPT to suggest ways to improve it or to challenge your perspective.
• Ask questions when stuck: If you get stuck trying to understand a topic or concept, use AI to break it down for you. Try different approaches like "explain [topic] like I'm 5" or "use sporting analogies to explain [topic] to me", then try explaining it back to ChatGPT in your own words.
• View AI as a tutor: Use AI to help you practise and revise rather than to do the work for you. Tell it a topic or feed it notes you want to understand or memorise. Then ask it to test your understanding with short answer or multi-choice questions.

Here's a prompt we've refined and like to use at Learnmate:

Act as my personal Socratic tutor. I’ll give you a [topic/notes on a topic] I want to understand better. Start by asking me if I want: (1) A simple explanation (including relevant analogies), (2) Some questions to help me critically think it through and to test my understanding, or (3) Whether I just want to be tested on my current understanding of the topic. Then, based on what I choose, help me explore the topic step by step. If I get confused, break it down, ask guiding questions, and keep checking if I’m ready to move on. Your goal is to help me learn by thinking and gaining clarity - not just by giving me the answers.

Tips for Parents

Parents can support a healthy adoption of AI by:

• Having the discussion: Talk to your children about how they are currently using AI and/or to show you so you are aware whether their learning and understanding is being supported or replaced by AI.
• Setting boundaries on AI use: Make sure it is being used as much or as little as you are comfortable with. For instance, encourage its use for checking work or brainstorming, and discourage its use for answering homework questions, drafting essays or completing entire assignments.
• Lean into discomfort: Remember that struggle and discomfort is when growth happens. Encourage your child to persevere rather than to pivot to AI when the going gets tough.

A Balanced Future

The momentum behind AI is like a technological hurricane - adoption of AI has been faster and more widespread than anything we’ve seen before. Resisting it is futile. Equally, however, blindly embracing it, without understanding its impacts, is just as risky. And we should be mindful of our children being the guinea pigs. The goal should be to deeply understand it and its impacts so we can decide how best to use it for ourselves and for our children.

At Learnmate, we use AI often to accelerate and enhance what we do so we can achieve our goals sooner. We are also acutely aware that when overused, it can flatten creativity and dull independent and critical thinking. As adults, many of us can feel this shift as we have the benefit of knowing what life felt like before AI. Our kids won’t have that reference point. They’ll need us - parents, teachers, mentors - to be the guard rails.

We need to keep challenging them to think, to write, to reason. To feel the spark of understanding when they figure something out on their own. To ensure that in this great wave of AI adoption, we are not trading away what matters most: stronger, more capable minds.