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Does Using ChatGPT Change Your Brain Activity? Study Sparks Debate<\/p>\n
Scientists warn against reading too much into a small experiment about ChatGPT and brain activity that is receiving a lot of buzz<\/p>\n
Thai Liang Lim\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The brains of people writing an essay with ChatGPT are less engaged than those of people blocked from using any online tools for the task, a study finds. The investigation is part of a broader movement to assess whether artificial intelligence (AI) is making us cognitively lazy.<\/p>\n
Computer scientist Nataliya Kosmyna at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her colleagues measured brain-wave activity in university students as they wrote essays either using a chatbot or an Internet search tool, or without any Internet at all. Although the main result is unsurprising, some of the study\u2019s findings are more intriguing: for instance, the team saw hints that relying on a chatbot for initial tasks might lead to relatively low levels of brain engagement even when the tool is later taken away.<\/p>\n
Echoing some posts about the study on online platforms, Kosmyna is careful to say that the results shouldn\u2019t be overinterpreted. This study cannot and did not show \u201cdumbness in the brain, no stupidity, no brain on vacation,\u201d Kosmyna laughs. It involved only a few dozen participants over a short time and cannot address whether habitual chatbot use reshapes our thinking in the long-term, or how the brain might respond during other AI-assisted tasks. \u201cWe don\u2019t have any of these answers in this paper,\u201d Kosmyna says. The work was posted ahead of peer review on the preprint server arXiv on 10 June.<\/p>\n
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Kosmyna\u2019s team recruited 60 students, aged 18 to 39, from five universities around the city of Boston, Massachusetts. The researchers asked them to spend 20 minutes crafting a short essay answering questions, such as \u201cshould we always think before we speak?\u201d, that appear on Scholastic Assessment Tests, or SATs.<\/p>\n
The participants were divided into three groups: one used ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI\u2019s large language model GPT-4o, as the sole source of information for their essays; another used Google to search for material (without any AI-assisted answers); and the third was forbidden to go online at all. In the end, 54 participants wrote essays answering three questions while in their assigned group, and then 18 were re-assigned to a new group to write a fourth essay, on one of the topics that they had tackled previously.<\/p>\n
Each student wore a commercial electrode-covered cap, which collected electroencephalography (EEG) readings as they wrote. These headsets measure tiny voltage changes from brain activity and can show which broad regions of the brain are \u2018talking\u2019 to each other.<\/p>\n
The students who wrote essays using only their brains showed the strongest, widest-ranging connectivity among brain regions, and had more activity going from the back of their brains to the front, decision-making area. They were also, unsurprisingly, better able to quote from their own essays when questioned by the researchers afterwards.<\/p>\n
The Google group, by comparison, had stronger activations in areas known to be involved with visual processing and memory. And the chatbot group displayed the least brain connectivity during the task.<\/p>\n
More brain connectivity isn\u2019t necessarily good or bad, Kosmyna says. In general, more brain activity might be a sign that someone is engaging more deeply with a task, or it might be a sign of inefficiency in thinking, or an indication that the person is overwhelmed by \u2018cognitive overload\u2019.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, when the participants who initially used ChatGPT for their essays switched to writing without any online tools, their brains ramped up connectivity \u2014 but not to the same level as in the participants who worked without the tools from the beginning.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis evidence aligns with a worry that many creativity researchers have about AI \u2014 that overuse of AI, especially for idea generation, may lead to brains that are less well-practised in core mechanisms of creativity,\u201d says Adam Green, co-founder of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity and a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.<\/p>\n
But only 18 people were included in this last part of the study, Green notes, which adds uncertainty to the findings. He also says there could be other explanations for the observations: for instance, these students were rewriting an essay on a topic they had already tackled, and therefore the task might have drawn on cognitive resources that differed from those required when writing about a brand-new topic.<\/p>\n
Confoundingly, the study also showed that switching to a chatbot to write an essay after previously composing it without any online tools boosted brain connectivity \u2014 the opposite, Green says, of what you might expect. This suggests it could be important to think about when AI tools are introduced to learners to enhance their experience, Kosmyna says. \u201cThe timing might be important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many educational scholars are optimistic about the use of chatbots as effective, personalized tutors. Guido Makransky, an educational psychologist at the University of Copenhagen, says these tools work best when they guide students to ask reflective questions, rather than giving them answers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an interesting paper, and I can see why it\u2019s getting so much attention,\u201d Makransky says. \u201cBut in the real world, students would and should interact with AI in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on June 25, 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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