A few weeks ago, one of my students told me she used ChatGPT to “think for her.” Not to write something sophisticated, but just to phrase an email, writing the draft of an essay, or create a formula in Excel.
A small, almost invisible moment. Yet it stayed with me. Because I realized that, slowly, we are outsourcing pieces of our mind.
There was a time when we could do basic math without a calculator. When we remembered our friends’ phone numbers. When we could find our way in a new city without Google Maps (well, not me, to be honest. My sense of direction has always been terrible, so I usually ended up asking strangers for help).
Now, we let technology do the remembering, the orienting, the calculating.
And with generative AI, we’ve started to let it do the thinking.
Psychologists call it the Reverse Flynn Effect. For most of the twentieth century, average IQ scores rose steadily – a trend known as the Flynn Effect. But in recent years, that curve has started to bend downwards.
We’re not necessarily getting “dumber,” but we’re losing the cognitive muscles we no longer train: memory, focus, problem-solving, even imagination.
A recent MIT study found that brain activity systematically decreases as people rely more on Large Language Models like ChatGPT. The more we use them, the less we activate the neural circuits that normally light up when we think. In other words, the tool designed to expand our intelligence may quietly be replacing it.
I call this “misthinking”. In my mind, it is not thinking wrong, but thinking away from ourselves: delegating not only the task, but the process, the effort, the silence that makes thinking human.
The point isn’t to reject technology. It’s to stay conscious of what we trade each time we let it think on our behalf. Because if we stop exercising our ability to think, connect, and imagine, we may end up in a world where everything is generated, and nothing truly belongs to us anymore.
