Crutches Invert Purpose and AI Makes You Dumb

As the new age narrows humanity a bit, we are going to start asking what we did to lose sight of reality. One answer is that whatever methods we adopt displace parts of our minds that otherwise handle those needs.

It turns out that we can see this most clearly with AI/LLM, which is shaping us as much as we are shaping it. Specifically, heavy LLM/AI users lose cognitive ability when they become dependent on the crutch, proxy, and surrogate thinking of AI:

Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

Do we see this often? Degeneration in the Darwinian context refers to the loss of any ability which has ceased to become relevant to survival; he raised the example of blind cave fish which lived in total darkness where sight was no longer a survival advantage.

In the same way, children who have seen only masked faces (temporarily) lose the ability to distinguish facial expressions:

In contrast, the processing of facial emotions was affected: across ages, while pre-pandemic children showed differential activity, during-pandemic children did not neurocognitively differentiate between happy and fearful expressions. This effect was primarily attributed to a reduced amplitude in response to happy faces.

If people saw only masked faces in daily life for multiple generations, the circuitry required to differentiate facial expressions would vanish from our brains. There is a cost to keeping it around, both in space and energy, and so if no longer relevant, it would be replaced.

The problem with proxies, surrogates, and crutches is that they interrupt our internal brain rhythm which synchronizes the vividly intense internal stimulus with knowledge of the external in order to keep us from venturing into chaotic mental states:

When we focus, switch tasks, or face tough mental challenges, the brain starts to sync its internal rhythms, especially in the midfrontal region. A new study has found that smarter individuals show more precise and flexible coordination of slow theta waves during key decision-making moments. Using EEG recordings and cognitive testing, researchers discovered that it is not constant brainwave synchronization that matters most, but the brain’s ability to dynamically adapt its rhythms like a well-tuned orchestra. This flexible neural harmony seems to be a hidden engine behind attention, reasoning, and intelligence.

The brain runs on parallel harmony that unites the mental map of the external world that we have with our new stimulus. Since thoughts from inside the brain have more intensity than external stimulus, it is necessary to constantly rebalance to avoid becoming solipsistic.