Your Brain on ChatGPT

MIT Study Finds That Not Thinking Has Consequences

By Joachim Osther Published on July 11, 2025

In the workplace and classrooms, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, such as ChatGPT and OpenAI, to produce products and write papers is proliferating at breakneck speed.

With AI zealots touting these platforms as frontrunners in a new age of efficiency, what could possibly go wrong?

A nation teeming with cognitively diminished people who are vulnerable to manipulation — that’s what could go wrong.

A study conducted by a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found vast detrimental consequences for those using an artificial assistant to write essays when compared to those who did the actual legwork themselves.

The authors summarized that the cohort using AI showed large comparative decreases in neural brainwave activity, linguistic and thought development, and overall learning skills.

Translation: Not thinking has intellectual consequences.

In fact, the authors refer to the downside of using AI assistants as accruing cognitive debt — the decline in brain function manifesting in “diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation,” and “decreased creativity.”

But wait, there’s more.

Brain Waves Plunge and Reasoning Exits

In the study, participants were hooked up to an EEG machine to measure their brain waves.

They compared the AI-assisted group’s neural activity against the “brain-only” group that didn’t use AI. The astonishing difference in the images is like comparing satellite images of North Korea vs. South Korea at night — one is nearly blacked out, the other a bright, animated hive of activity.

Beyond hampering creativity and problem-solving abilities, the scientists noted an impact on human reasoning.

The study revealed that the AI cohort was far less inclined to consider whether what the AI was telling them was actually true.

In other words, the group that used AI not only had reduced neural activity but were also highly vulnerable to the echo chamber effect — they simply believed whatever ChatGPT churned out.

Let that sink in.

AI assistants are far from objective. They are subject to the biases of their developers — and then there’s the problem of lying. Yes, AI assistants also lie — or to use the technical term, they “hallucinate.”

Society Embraces AI

To be sure, AI assistants can and will be used for good in a variety of ways. Yet we need to think of it the same way we look at nuclear fusion. On the one hand, nuclear fusion has given us nuclear energy and variety medical applications; on the other, it has produced nuclear warheads and dirty bombs.

To the Christian, this human paradox is no surprise.

Manipulating good and using it for evil is consistent with man’s fallen nature. While God has given mankind the resources needed to thrive, Adam’s progeny will continue perverting these gifts into elements of destruction — and AI is no exception.

The study implications are inherently limited by its size, so we’re left with our own reasoning to consider the long-term effect of farming out our own thinking to machines.

Good Questions That Have No Answers … Yet

So let’s ask some logical questions:

What will happen to brain development if kids and teens use AI assistants pervasively during their formative years? How will wide swaths of future generations become competent, capable, and inquisitive adults?

What if globalists and billionaire elites, like Bill Gates and Alex Soros, harness AI assistants to sprinkle in secular Leftist dogma? And who’s to say they aren’t already doing it? Is it a stretch to imagine that many aren’t already surreptitiously spawning malleable populations?

Not a pretty image, is it?

The MIT study is a glimpse into a potential future where autonomous thinkers are the minority. That future is filled with cognitively incapable lemmings who are easily manipulated into accepting a globalist Utopian vision of a one world government.

Please Support The Stream: Equipping Christians to Think Clearly About the Political, Economic, and Moral Issues of Our Day.

While we are currently in a time of “winning” under President Donald Trump, let’s remember what President Ronald Reagan said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

So make your kids do the work, because not thinking has dire consequences.

Joachim Osther is a freelance writer focusing on the intersection of culture and Christianity. He holds a master’s degree in theological studies from Veritas College and Seminary, and two degrees in the life sciences, a field in which he works as a strategist, advisor, and published author. He is also an occasional contributor to RaymondIbrahim.com, chronicling the relevance of historical clashes between militant Islam and the West.