Those Claude commercials. Everyone’s exploring deep-sea trenches or musing over black holes. Maybe I need cooler friends, but no one I know is using AI to engage in open-minded collaboration.
They’re using it to offload their critical thinking, to get a quick answer or result: Reply to this email; draft a Chicago itinerary; diagnose my rash.
Last year, MIT Media Lab released a fascinating paper titled, “Your brain on chatgpt: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an ai assistant for essay writing task.” The authors grouped participants into three different buckets — LLM, Search Engine and Brain-Only — then had them write a variety of essays using their assigned tool over four months.
The group that used AI registered the lowest brain connectivity, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” English teachers who reviewed their work dubbed it “soulless.” Even worse: as the experiment went on, they seemed to lose interest in doing any of the work.
“By their third essay,” lead author Nataliya Kosmyna said, “many of the writers simply gave the prompt to ChatGPT and had it do almost all of the work. “It was more like, ‘just give me the essay, refine this sentence, edit it, and I’m done.’”
Unsurprisingly, the brain-only group had the highest rates of neural connectivity. But the Google group also expressed high engagement and satisfaction with their essays. The key takeaway here: the non-AI groups felt ownership over their work. They had to go on memorable fact-finding missions (either online or within their own brains), then synthesize that information into coherent, if-imperfect threads. That’s a textbook example of critical thinking.
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The Value of Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is often defined as a “soft skill.” But I’ve also seen it described as a form of “literacy.” We can’t imagine operating in modern life without the ability to read — so why would we willingly erode our ability to think?
Perhaps because a life full of critical thinking is cumbersome. It isn’t “frictionless.” (Take it from someone in the middle of writing an essay himself: I’ve cut more sentences at this point than those you’re seeing on the page.) But isn’t that process worth it? What writing instincts could I claim if the moment I ran out of ideas, I called in the chatbot? And this is to say nothing of the ethics of such a decision.
It’s a little like those contestants on the Netflix survival show Alone, if you’ve ever seen it. They’re out in the Canadian wilderness, building camps, hunting bears and preparing for the winter. If things get too dire, they can press a red button and get whisked out of there. We can’t judge them for pressing the red button: it’s there for a reason, and it guarantees their safety. But what if they pressed it the very first time their stomach growled? They wouldn’t have time to devise a clever squirrel trap or build a lean-to. They wouldn’t accomplish anything worth remembering.
How to Think Critically Again
Considering its correlations with creativity, memory and life satisfaction, I think we should characterize critical thinking as a “wellness practice” — something worth protecting, worth seeking out. How on earth do we do that, though? Particularly when AI is infiltrating industries and bleeding into everyday life? I’ve sketched out a few ideas to consider:
1. The “owl on the shoulder”
This one’s courtesy of Christopher Dede, a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He points out that the owl on the shoulder of Athena, goddess of wisdom, was there to make her wiser — not replace her. “You may end up using AI to write a job application letter that is the same as everybody else’s because they’re also using AI, and you may lose the job as a result,” he says. “You always have to remember that the owl sits on your shoulder and not the other way around.”
To his point, critical thinking can coexist with the AI era. The key is identifying which tasks can be automated, which ones might require you to have a collaborative conversation with the bot and which ones could benefit from deep, independent thought. (Hashing all of this out is a useful critical thinking warm-up in its own right.)
2. Use it or lose it
Like strength and aging, critical thinking has a “use it or lose it” aspect. “If you are not actively learning, your mind is weakening — just like any muscle,” Bruce Tulgan, JD, writes in Psychology Today. He recommends constantly studying new information and honing good techniques.
When I started researching this article, I expected to encounter lists urging readers to read, write, audit courses, solve puzzles, play chess, etc. Those are all worth your time, of course. But by “good technique,” Tulgan is going even broader — he’s referring to keeping an open mind. Critical thinking means contemplating multiple perspectives, referring to the knowledge you’ve stored, questioning your own biases and practicing active listening. It’s a complex process that takes place in the real world.
3. The buck stops with you
People want to be seen as smart decision-makers; we associate the quality with authority and confidence. But how are you going to make decisions — let alone own them or defend them — if you let AI handle your reasoning and reflections?
To make good decisions you have to get used to sitting in the discomfort of critical thinking, day after day. The same way you might park your butt in a sauna, or hang on during a long run. That sounds masochistic, but it’s ultimately way more satisfying, figuring things out the old-fashioned way. And it starts to feel easier (or at least more natural) the more you do it.
4. If you need some extra help…
I understand that “tech is turning your brain into scrambled eggs” essays sometimes miss the point — that we didn’t ask for any of this and are now hopelessly addicted. How do I even stop using AI, if I’m used to it writing my sales decks (or diagnosing my rashes) week in and week out?
Personally, I recommend downloading Cold Turkey, a plug-in which allows you to set timed blocks on a personal list of websites and apps. This has been a real game-changer for me when I’m on a writing deadline (it always stops me from surfing Zillow) but it could help you take multi-hour divorces from AI.
Think about it.
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