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There’s a new (unreviewed draft of a) scientific article out, examining the relationship between Large Language Model (LLM) use and brain functionality, which many reporters are incorrectly claiming shows proof that ChatGPT is damaging people’s brains.

As an educator and writer, I am concerned by the growing popularity of so-called AI writing programs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, which when used injudiciously can take all of the struggle and reward out of writing, and lead to carefully written work becoming undervalued. But as a psychologist and lifelong skeptic, I am forever dismayed by sloppy, sensationalistic reporting on neuroscience, and how eager the public is to believe any claim that sounds scary or comes paired with a grainy image of a brain scan.

So I wanted to take a moment today to unpack exactly what the study authors did, what they actually found, and what the results of their work might mean for anyone concerned about the rise of AI — or the ongoing problem of irresponsible science reporting.

If you don’t have time for 4,000 lovingly crafted words, here’s the tl;dr.

The major caveats with this study are:

This paper has not been peer-reviewed, which is generally seen as an essential part of ensuring research quality in academia.

The researchers chose to get this paper into the public eye as quickly as possible because they are concerned about the use of LLMs, so their biases & professional motivations ought to be taken into account.

Its subject pool is incredibly small (N=54 total).

Subjects had no reason to care about the quality of the essays they wrote, so it’s hardly surprising the ones who were allowed to use AI tools didn’t try.

EEG scans only monitored brain function while writing the essays, not subjects’ overall cognitive abilities, or effort at tasks they actually cared about.

Google users were also found to utilize fewer cognitive resources and engage in less memory retrieval while writing their essays in this study, but nobody seems to hand-wring about search engines being used to augment writing anymore.

Cognitive ability & motivation were not measured in this study.

Changes in cognitive ability & motivation over time were not measured.

This was a laboratory study that cannot tell us how individuals actually use LLMs in their daily life, what the long-term effects of LLM use are, and if there are any differences in those who choose to use LLMs frequently and those who do not.

The researchers themselves used an AI model to analyze their data, so staunch anti-AI users don’t have support for there views here.

Brain-imaging research is seductive and authoritative-seeming to the public, making it more likely to get picked up (and misrepresented) by reporters.

Educators have multiple reasons to feel professionally and emotionally threatened by widespread LLM use, which influences the studies we design and the conclusions that we draw on the subject.

Students have very little reason to care about writing well right now, given the state of higher ed; if we want that to change, we have to reward slow, painstaking effort.

The stories we tell about our abilities matter. When individuals falsely believe they are “brain damaged” by using a technological tool, they will expect less of themselves and find it harder to adapt.

Head author Nataliya Kosmyna and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab set out to study how the use of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT affects students’ critical engagement with writing tasks, using electroencephalogram scans to monitor their brains’ electrical activity as they were writing. They also evaluated the quality of participants’ papers on several dimensions, and questioned them after the fact about what they remembered of their essays.

Each of the study’s 54 research subjects were brought in for four separate writing sessions over a period of four months. It was only during these writing tasks that students’ brain activity was monitored.

Prior research has shown that when individuals rely upon an LLM to complete a cognitively demanding task, they devote fewer of their own cognitive resources to that task, and use less critical thinking in their approach to that task. Researchers call this process of handing over the burden of intellectually demanding activities to a large language model cognitive offloading, and there is a concern voiced frequently in the literature that repeated cognitive offloading could diminish a person’s actual cognitive abilities over time or create AI dependence.

Now, there is a big difference between deciding not to work very hard on an activity because technology has streamlined it, and actually losing the ability to engage in deeper thought, particularly since the tasks that people tend to offload to LLMs are repetitive, tedious, or unfulfilling ones that they’re required to complete for work and school and don’t otherwise value for themselves. It would be foolhardy to assume that simply because a person uses ChatGPT to summarize an assigned reading for a class that they have lost the ability to read, just as it would be wrong to assume that a person can’t add or subtract because they have used a calculator.

However, it’s unquestionable that LLM use has exploded across college campuses in recent years and rendered a great many introductory writing assignments irrelevant, and that educators are feeling the dread that their profession is no longer seen as important. I have written about this dread before — though I trace it back to government disinvestment in higher education and commodification of university degrees that dates back to Reagan, not to ChatGPT.

College educators have been treated like underpaid quiz-graders and degrees have been sold with very low barriers to completion for decades now, I have argued, and the rise of students submitting ChatGPT-written essays to be graded using ChatGPT-generated rubrics is really just a logical consequence of the profit motive that has already ravaged higher education. But I can’t say any of these longstanding economic developments have been positive for the quality of the education that we professors give out (or that it’s helped students remain motivated in their own learning process), so I do think it is fair that so many academics are concerned that widespread LLM use could lead to some kind of mental atrophy over time.

This study, however, is not evidence that any lasting cognitive atrophy has happened. It would take a far more robust, long-term study design tracking subjects’ cognitive engagement against a variety of tasks that they actually care about in order to test that.

Rather, Kosmyna and colleagues brought their 54 study participants into the lab four separate times, and assigned them SAT-style essays to write, in exchange for a $100 stipend. The study participants did not earn any grade, and having a high-quality essay did not earn them any additional compensation. There was, therefore, very little personal incentive to try very hard at the essay-writing task, beyond whatever the participant already found gratifying about it.

I wrote all about the viral study supposedly linking AI use to cognitive decline, and the problem of irresponsible, fear-mongering science reporting. You can read the full piece for free on my Substack.

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The Traitor Baru Cormorant (2015)

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Vintage Phantom of the Opera movie poster featuring the cutest version of the Phantom ever.

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smallvirtualspace replied to your post “doodoopoopycacammunism replied to your post “Gretchen McCulloch or…”

I literally just watched a video of a white woman saying Africans (black people particularly) aren’t capable of abstract thought because the Zulu language is simple.

saying that a language is “simple” meanwhile I had to read a 30-page academic essay about the possibility of a statistical measurement of the complexity of a language that went into & subsequently discarded various methods of mathematical analysis all of which relied on precision, technology, & astronomical amounts of time that we don’t have only for the conclusion to be that it is, in fact, not possible at the present juncture

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Lmao how is this real, "the ambient sounds of the world were wrong, sir"

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“baru cormorant should be at the club” baru cormorant WAS at the club and it almost got her arrested for gay sex she didn’t even have

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reading baru cormorant is like. I’m at a party where the most insufferable people I know are playing settlers of catan. they invite me to join I say no thank you. they say oh come on you’ll pick it up quickly. I say that’s fine I’ll just watch. I try to focus but there are three beautiful women attempting to seduce one of the players and this is so much more interesting. and yet she ignores them and continues to play settlers of catan

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In Thick as Thieves, Costis draws a parallel between Kamet + himself and Immakuk + Ennikar, but I’ve always wondered how Kamet would have related to the poems when he was young and had dreams of running the Mede empire from behind the scenes.

Kamet's scholarly description of the Immukuk and Ennikar tablets invites an obvious comparison to the real-world epic of Gilgamesh:

“You said you were reciting from the first tablet,” said the Attolian. “There are more than a hundred in the temple of Anet alone,” I said. “No one knows how many there are altogether. Scholars argue about it. Some of the tablets are retellings of other tablets, only differing in style. Sometimes parts of the story change.”

Thick as Thieves, Chapter 2

This could easily be a description of our reception of the Gilgamesh story, too, with significant differences between various ancient traditions, and the role of Enkidu (loosely, a model for Ennikar in QT) changing drastically between the Sumerian vs. Akkadian versions of the myth:

In the Sumerian tales … Enkidu is Gilgamesh’s servant, not his friend. […] Indeed, it seems that converting Enkidu into Gilgamesh’s friend was the seminal change by which the Akkadian author lent unity to the materials which he used in the epic. […] To enable Enkidu’s death to turn Gilgamesh from the pursuit of lasting fame to a literal quest for immortality, the Akkadian author seized upon the sporadic hints of friendship in the Sumerian tales and applied them across the board, consistently terming Enkidu Gilgamesh’s friend, brother, and equal, whom he loves and is to caress.

Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic

In QT, following MWT's tendency to make her myths a little more hopeful and YA-friendly, Immakuk and Ennikar escape the land of the dead, although we don't know how because that part of the tablet is broken. (Another neat callout to the Gilgamesh epic, which survives mostly intact but with significant portions missing!) But in the real version, Gilgamesh's love for Enkidu becomes a springboard for the poem to explore the inevitability of death: in fact, depending on what you understand the 12th tablet to be doing, Gilgamesh loses Enkidu not once but twice.

The parallel/earlier tradition of Enkidu as Gilgamesh's servant begs the question whether there are similar traditions about Ennikar in any of those alternate tablets Kamet mentions. If there are, it would point to another obvious parallel that a younger Kamet might have made—between Ennikar and himself as Nahuseresh's (or Naheelid's) right hand man, guarding him faithfully between adventures and somewhat subject to his dangerous whims. Compare these two passages:

Gilgamesh went up to the top of the mountain, and offered sacred flour to its peak: “Bring me a dream, mountain! Show me a good omen.” Enkidu built him a house for the Dream God, with a windbreak against the storm. He had Gilgamesh lie in a circle of sacred flour, while Enkidu slept like a snare in the doorway.

Gilgamesh, trans. Sophus Helle

Nahuseresh was a light sleeper, a matter of necessity for him, and when he’d opened his eyes in the darkness of his room and seen a moving flicker of white, he had been instantly alert, slipping his hand under his pillow for the long knife he kept there before he’d rolled quickly to one side. He’d found a woman standing calmly by his bed looking down at him. […] He had wanted to ask where she’d come from and what had become of Kamet, who should have been sleeping in the anteroom….

Queen of Attolia, Chapter 17

And of course the comparison to the original myth (all about death!) wouldn't be complete without Gen's apology:

"I'm sorry," said the king. "I know you wanted your chance at the emperor's side, even if it meant your death would come with his." "We all die," I snapped.

Thick as Thieves, Chapter 13

None of this is to negate the primary (and frequent) parallels between Kamet and Costis's journey/friendship and Immakuk and Ennikar's adventures in the QT poems! I just think the secondary, potentially darker parallels are interesting too.

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(no children, the mountain goats/US politics)

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It's great to see that essay about how the postcolonial canon is constructed to privilege a white western gaze clearly reflecting people's experiences & resonating with them, but it's also weird to see an Indian professor writing about how this works out in a purely Indian setting where theoretically this canon gaze should be absent getting repurposed into This Says Something About The White Western University/Academia (it does, but that specific thing has also been...said before, many times, in the conversation about world literature, or Zadie Smith talking about writing and representation or Elif Batuman talking about the white v non white literary canon)

But that essay hit a nerve for me because I went to university in a theoretically completely non-white setting - Indian college with Indian profs. But my literature syllabus was structured exactly like this. Indian literature wasn't about form; it was about charting Indian history and cultural zeitgeists through fiction and even poetry (there, I suppose, my professor went further than the postcolonial canon demands). When we studied American literature, Scott Fitzgerald was about the literary techniques and the symbolism; Toni Morrison was What Does This Say About Race In America.

Arguably, yes. One of those professors was educated in the white academy. I don't know about the other professor, so I can't comment on that. But between that and the strange disconnect between us, the students, and the postcolonial theory we were reading was fascinating - hybridity made sense only to the Christian kids, or kids who'd been to convent/Christian schools or whose primary cultural exposure was to Brit lit and media. I don't think anyone even read Spivak, let alone enjoyed her or thought she made sense, though Can The Subaltern Speak was quickly appropriated to discuss Dalit communities speaking back against the majority. The way postcolonial theory discussed race just had nothing that really could be connected to our experience of the world unless we were a specific kind of upper middle class or if we had immigrated or had racialized experiences - because postcolonial literature and theory exists specifically in relation to an Other, and most of us came into the university with lives largely untouched by this Other (even if the Other left us with colonial legacies everywhere, right down to politics, ethnic violence and sport). Postcoloniality is as much about socializing people into a way of thinking as it is a theory - in fact it is only a theory that exists when that process of socialization to see oneself as a postcolonial subject takes place.

I think this specific essay is interesting because its argument about decolonisation isn't about whiteness specifically, but the ways in which we independently absorb and replicate and racialize ourselves. Or the weirdness where postcoloniality is the dutiful lens through which we read ourselves, imported from Indian academics explaining ourselves to a Western audience/academia, to the point that I, an Indian living in India, still think of Indian literature primarily in terms of how it explains my own fucking country to me - despite the fact that I have a reasonably strong grasp of its history, its politics, its economics, its diversity & cultures. Or more to the point, where I've had it so ingrained into me as an approach, that I end up approaching all literature outside of western Euramerica as a handbook for explanation - can this work explain this country to me, say something about this specific culture or people via their histories and lives. But that's not necessarily how I approach literature by Western Euramerican authors!

Like. How do you articulate and frame decolonisation in this specific context? Where white people aren't involved at all except in how we are always trying to make ourselves scrutable to them even when they aren't and will never be in the same damn room as us?

Anyway, thinking also about the joy we found in reading Barthes and his theory, and how we might suggest the need for decolonisation by de-prioritizing him, when his theory described the world or talked about a way of seeing the world, reading signs, analyzing myth, in a way that had nothing to do with possessing a specific lived experience that relied on being racialized and postcolonialized but just was. Like, which is which. I don't think there's a simple answer and nor should there be. But I am really tired of the assumption that everything is purely always being done in relationship to an immediately tangible/visible white gaze when sometimes it is simply a gaze that is imposed thirdhand in the name of liberation by people who are non-white just like you. A perverse globalised, outsourced colonization and recolonization, exported back and forth.

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i think it's pretty disingenuous to claim that illiteracy is secretly beneficial to the ruling class lmao. lots of assumptions baked in there about the putative value of written information specifically, and about written information as some kind of bastion of truth to power (known voice of the people, the publishing industry). but more to the point it just seems profoundly detached from the extreme hostility that, say, the entire job market systematically exhibits toward illiterate people and even low-literacy people. nothing about our current society is set up to accommodate those who cannot or do not read, like literally this renders people instantly socially marginal and you can see it happening if you've ever seen someone struggling with, say, reading and filling out forms at the doctors office or for a driving test, not to even mention the interpersonal ramifications like the general widespread assumption that reading ability = intelligence = worth. there is no social force or mandate from above demanding illiteracy---quite the opposite in fact

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Okay so when I got sucked into the phantom zone last week while watching youtube shorts a lot of the content it fed me was ADHD tips and a lot of it was either useless for me or redundant but there was one REALLY good tip about taking breaks that wasn't about taking breaks it was about RETURNING from breaks and the tip is: when you are about to go on a break, before you step away from your task (work, craft project, school stuff) decide what you'll do as the first thing when you sit back down at your task and set up your workspace to do that thing.

That means you've got an easy re-entry point to go back to doing the thing instead of sitting back down and having to make a decision or having to reorient from break mode to task mode. You have pre-reoriented and can just go back into working mode.

I've been doing this by circling what my next task on my tasklist is and bringing up the windows that I'll need for the task before I step away from my desk.

Brilliant hack, works great for me, hope it works great for you as well.

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someone convince me that downloading PDFs is not actually the same thing as working on my dissertation

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[rant about how everyone but OP is “braindead” and “stupid” with “no reading comprehension” and “low media literacy” that partakes heavily of Degeneration Theory-era ableism and quasi-race science] [explanation that this rancour is because these stupid people are missing {thing about text that is arguable, ambiguous, or heavily relies on OP parsing metaphorical language literally}]

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✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖 Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

Please don't spoil, this is not a quiz. :)

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Å in Lofoten, Norway (2024). A place that feels like the very end of the world.