something which i’m observing in myself is:

• when i try to read, chat with ai to understand a concept at a deeper level, why does it fade away much faster than what i’ve just written down and put some conscious effort into understanding?
• it’s easy to understand things with ai, but is it easy to forget as well?
• do you think faster learning without cognitive effort will result in losing the learning from memory/understanding?

are people jumping into answers and thinking less?

• yes, because it’s been the same pattern of how human brains worked over the years.
  • calculator -> less arithmetic thinking
  • internet (google) -> less remembering facts/knowledge
  • ai -> less struggling with explanations and derivations
• ai actually gives you highly polished, reasoned information to consume, rather than just showing facts, which is easily consumable by a human brain instead of thinking.
• so the flow became:
  • ask -> read -> consume -> leave
• instead of:
  • ask -> think -> struggle -> derive -> verify

the brain functions to always reduce the energy consumption of the human body, always looking for a cheaper way to complete processing. it starts recognition (oh, that feels right) over generation (let me write this from scratch), leading to less formation of cognitive ability to remember that for too long.

cognitive offloading: delegating thinking/derivation/reasoning to external tools/ai and letting them consume the energy.

the brain is always lazy.

so is ai making us dumber?

• could be a great differentiating factor in how you use it, obv. more like:
  • “just give me the answer” -> your brain will process less, rather consume more and just leave.
  • “i want to understand and go deeply” -> you are trying to form a picture of something you don’t know, and you’re struggling to derive some information in your brain.

if you always let ai think for you:
-> weaker intuition
-> weaker memory
-> weaker ability to reason/verify when the tool isn’t available

even though your brain tricks you into offloading thinking to ai, you shouldn’t accept that by default. something i’m trying to follow over the past few weeks is: give 2–3 minutes of natural thinking and formation of a vague cognitive image of something i’m doing, and then give that to ai to correct it and let it teach. this habit is helping me a lot in doing things fast, as well as building the cognitive understanding across.