Cognitive offloading: Is AI making us dumber?
Oct 24, 2026
If you've started asking ChatGPT for things you used to work out yourself, it's fair to wonder what that's doing to your brain. Handing mental work to a tool is called cognitive offloading, and you already do it every time you set a reminder or reach for a calculator. AI isn't making people less intelligent across the board, but it can take over the practice that keeps a skill sharp.
So the better question is which tasks to give it, and that depends on whether you want to keep the skill.
Quick answer: Is AI making us dumber?
No, not in general. The research so far doesn't show AI lowering people's intelligence.
Cognitive offloading is normal and often helps. Writing things down and saving files can free your memory for whatever comes next.
The real risk is narrower than the headlines make it sound. When AI does the work you're trying to learn, you learn less of it, and a skill you hand over completely is a skill you stop practicing.
Sort your tasks into three groups. Hand over what you only need to store or look up, do the work you care about yourself first and let AI check it, and keep practicing the everyday skills you don't want to lose.
What is cognitive offloading?
Cognitive offloading is using an action or a tool to make a mental task easier. Psychologists Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert, who reviewed the research on it in 2016, define it as "the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task so as to reduce cognitive demand." Their examples are as small as tilting your head to see a rotated image or setting a phone reminder for an upcoming appointment.
You offload because your working memory, the part of your mind that holds what you're using right now, only holds a little at a time. So every tool that holds something for you counts: a calendar, a calculator, the contacts in your phone, a map app, and now an AI assistant that drafts an email or sums up a report.
Offloading often helps. In lab studies, people who saved one file before studying a second one remembered the second file better, and the benefit disappeared when they couldn't trust the save. In another study of 114 people, writing letters down beat holding them in memory, mostly when there were a lot of letters to keep track of.
The best-known worry comes from a 2011 study in Science, often called the Google effect: When people expect to look something up later, they remember the fact less and remember where to find it better. Other researchers couldn't repeat one experiment from that study. The memory results weren't among the ones they retested.
How do you stop AI from making you dumber?
You keep AI from making you dumber by choosing what it does for you. A 2026 article by Cash and colleagues in Trends in Cognitive Sciences puts the risk plainly: Handing thinking to AI can get in the way of learning a skill and can let a skill you have fade, and how much depends on how you use it.
Task | What to do | Why |
|---|---|---|
An appointment, or where you saved a file | Hand it over | You only need to find it again, not know it |
A long list you need for the next hour | Hand it over | There's no skill to keep, just items to hold |
An email or message you care about | Write it first, then let AI check it | In an MIT study, 15 of 18 people who wrote an essay with ChatGPT couldn't correctly quote it right afterward, and people who wrote on their own first and used ChatGPT later remembered more than people who started with it |
Something new you're learning for work | Try it first, and ask for hints instead of answers | High school students who practiced math with a plain GPT-4 chat scored 17% lower on a later exam without it than students who never had it, while a tutor version built to give hints instead of answers caused no drop |
A fact or recommendation you'll act on | Hand it over, but check it before you use it | Knowledge workers who trusted AI more reported thinking critically less |
A tip or a discount at the store | Keep doing it yourself | These are quick bits of practice you'd otherwise never get |
A new coworker's name | Keep doing it yourself | A contact card can hold the name, but recalling it yourself is what helps it stick |
Getting around your own city | Keep doing it yourself, at least sometimes | In a study of 50 drivers, those who used GPS more had worse spatial memory when finding their way without it, and when 13 of them were retested three years later, the heavier users had slipped more |
The "keep doing it yourself" group is where a few minutes of practice pays off. Work out the tip before you open the calculator, and when you meet someone new, say their name back and try to recall it at the end of the meeting, which is active recall at work. For math, these mental math tricks give you shortcuts, and the free mental math practice game gives you a minute of drills.
Elevate, a brain training app, is built for this kind of practice. Name Recall, one of its memory games, helps you remember the names of people you meet, and Percentages and Tipping, two of its 12 math games, cover the tip and the discount. These are just a few of Elevate's 40+ games for memory, reading, writing, vocabulary, and math. (The memory games come with Elevate Premium.) Each workout takes a few minutes and adapts to how you do. If you'd like a small daily habit of doing it yourself, try Elevate's free daily workout.
Is AI making us smarter or dumber? What the studies found
AI can do both, and the studies say it comes down to who does the thinking. The ones behind the "dumber" headlines are smaller or less certain than they sound.
Study | Kind of study | Who | What it found | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Harvard physics AI tutor (2025) | Randomized trial | 194 students | Students scored higher after the AI tutor lesson than after an in-class lesson on the same topic (median 4.5 vs. 3.5), in less time | Two lessons, short term, and a tutor built for teaching, not a general chatbot |
Lab experiment with brain recordings | 54 adults from Boston-area universities | People writing with ChatGPT showed the weakest brain connectivity of three groups | Not peer reviewed as of October 2026, one essay task, and the authors' own FAQ answers "Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us dumber?" with "No!" | |
Survey | 319 knowledge workers | Workers who trusted their own skills more reported more critical thinking | Self-reported, so it measures what people noticed, not their skills | |
Gerlich (2025) | Survey | 666 people in the UK | People who used AI tools more scored lower on critical thinking | It shows a link, not a cause, and the answers are mostly self-reported |
Bastani and colleagues (2025) | Randomized trial | Nearly 1,000 high school students in Turkey | With GPT-4 during practice, scores rose 48% with the plain chat version and 127% with the hint-giving tutor, but only the hint group kept up on the exam without it | One school, math only, short term |
One more result from the Turkish trial stands out: The students who used the plain chat version didn't think they'd done any worse. So don't judge a tool by how a task feels. Judge it by whether you could still do the task without it.
FAQ
Is using AI bad for your brain?
No, not from the evidence so far. The MIT study recorded weaker brain connectivity while people wrote with ChatGPT during one task, and its authors ask the press not to call it brain damage.
Is AI making us lazy?
No, not by itself, but it makes skipping the effort easy. In the Turkish math trial, the researchers suggest students used the plain chat version "as a crutch", simply copying answers.
Date: 10/24/2026
