Autopilot: what ChatGPT does to your mind (and you don't realize it)

The dark price of convenience

🏷️ Categories: Memory, Attention, Learning.

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ChatGPT became the good butler.

• You’re writing an email and get stuck on a sentence. You open ChatGPT, type an instruction, and within seconds you have a clearer, better-written sentence, even with a touch of humor you hadn’t imagined. You smile. Copy, paste, move on with your day.

• You need to write your LinkedIn bio. Instead of thinking up a few lines, you type: “Write me a professional yet friendly description.” You copy, paste, and move on with your day.

• At night, standing in front of the fridge with rice, eggs, and tomatoes, you ask: “What can I cook with this?” ChatGPT answers. You follow the recipe. You go to bed.

And while everything seems normal, something quiet is happening in your mind.

Your brain adapts, reorganizes, and—without you noticing—learns a new way of thinking: delegated, external, and very comfortable… maybe too comfortable.
Today I want to tell you what’s happening inside you every time you use ChatGPT, and why that comfort has a cost that doesn’t show up on any bill—but you pay it every day.

The price is your ability to think.

1. The Price of Comfort

Artificial intelligence isn’t helping you think.

It’s taking the place where your thinking used to live.

Using ChatGPT reduces cognitive effort. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people who wrote essays assisted by AI showed lower neural activation, less memory retention, and lower concentration than those who wrote unaided (Kosmyna et al., 2025). The brain, grateful for the energy savings, stops training itself.

And that’s the real danger.

Every time you let ChatGPT form an idea for you, you strengthen dependency and weaken the mind. It’s like stopping walking because you own a car: useful, yes, but your legs lose strength until you’re exhausted after just a two-minute run.

Mental laziness, like physical laziness, exacts a toll over time.

2. How Your Brain Adapts

Your brain is constantly reconfiguring itself.

That’s what we call plasticity. When you stop using certain areas, others take over. In the habitual use of AI, the regions for planning, memory, and imagination become more passive, while the reward areas light up with every quick, satisfying response the AI gives.

A greater sense of achievement for less effort. That has an impact.

A study in Frontiers in Psychology found that the more you use ChatGPT, the more your brain gets used to searching outward instead of constructing inward (Shanmugasundaram & Tamilarasu, 2023). You depend more on others’ ideas and less on the ones you create.

It’s externalizing your thinking—a step beyond externalizing your memory.

Before, we forgot what we learned. Now we forget how to think.

3. To Assist or to Replace

ChatGPT was created to assist you, but the line between assisting and replacing is thin.

Each time you use AI to write, solve, or create, you delegate part of your mental effort. Psychologists call this cognitive offloading (Risko & Gilbert, 2016). It’s not new—we’ve done it since the invention of calculators.

The difference is that before, we offloaded numbers.

Now we offload ideas, emotions, creativity—everything.

We no longer ask the machine to calculate. We ask it to think. The brain adjusts accordingly. The problem is: the more you delegate, the less you process.

And the less you process, the less you understand—until you become the machine’s servant.

4. The Illusion of Competence

We believe that working with AI makes us smarter—but it doesn’t.

People who use AI to study or summarize learn faster, but remember less after two days (Bai, Liu & Su, 2023). The brain feels no need to absorb what it can retrieve in seconds. It makes us feel competent, believe we know, when in fact we’ve internalized nothing (Deslauriers et al., 2019).

It’s the well-known Google effect—but amplified.

A mirage of wisdom on the surface, a void of understanding underneath.

5. The Great Homogenization

Many believe AI boosts creativity. In reality, it makes you more generic.

AI-assisted texts tend to converge toward similar patterns of vocabulary, rhythm, structure, and tone. In other words: more correct, cleaner, and more predictable overall (Shanmugasundaram & Tamilarasu, 2023; Cong & Zhu, 2024).

If AI thinks for individuals, society eventually thinks the same way.

That’s why the internet is increasingly filled with generic, forgettable content—because the machine is shaping our thought and culture.

6. The Rewarded Brain

There’s still one question: why do we keep using ChatGPT?

Because of comfort, speed, and that feeling of achievement—our brain loves dopamine.

Each time you receive a satisfying answer, your reward circuit activates. You learn to associate AI with progress toward your goals. That’s why, even when you suspect you’re thinking less, your brain still seeks it out (Shanmugasundaram & Tamilarasu, 2023). In fact, heavy AI users develop weaker critical-thinking skills (Gerlich, 2025). It’s like junk food—it’s not healthy, but it’s so delicious…

But don’t think this is new. This mechanism already existed.

It’s the same one social media has used for years—the difference is that ChatGPT doesn’t just affect your attention or memory; it replaces your thinking itself.

Critical thinking isn’t threatened by AI. It’s threatened by our laziness.

Nothing more to add.

✍️ Your turn: Do you use AI as a helper—or to think for you?

💭 Quote of the day: “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” —David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Bai, L., Liu, X., & Su, J. (2023). ChatGPT: The cognitive effects on learning and memory. URL

2. Cong, L. W., & Zhu, W. (2024). Divergent LLM adoption and heterogeneous convergence paths in research writing URL

3. Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences URL

4. Gerlich, M. (2025). AI tools in society: Impacts on cognitive offloading and the future of critical thinking. Societies URL

5. Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X.-H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task URL

6. Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676–688. URL

7. Shanmugasundaram, M., & Tamilarasu, A. (2023). The impact of digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence on cognitive functions: A review. Frontiers in Cognition. URL