Our generation is the first to perform worse than their parents academically. That should signal
something.
Human cognitive abilities are much like a muscle. They need training or they lose their strength ; or
in this case, their neuroplasticity.
What's that, you ask? It's the ability for your brain to make new connections ; neural connections
and real-life connections ; for stronger memories, focus on current tasks, and most importantly of all,
to come up with new ideas.
ChatGPT can never actually make you creative. ChatGPT by default doesn't come up with new ideas;
it fetches from its memory to come up with maybe new ways to link its already existing ideas. But to
come up with actually new, never-heard-of, never-seen-before ideas ; that remains exclusive to
humans, to the brain you've got.
You are giving up on your neuroplasticity when you doom scroll for hours, when you go to Al tools
before analyzing the issue at hand. And just as astronauts experience the inability to walk after they
come back from space because they haven't used their leg muscles in months, so will you ; but with
the inability to sustain focus or exert creativity.
If human intelligence could be threatened by a fancy autocorrect machine, what does that say about
our definition of intelligence?
And how do we beat it?
The answer is incredibly unimpressive.
A paper and a pen.
Researchers at NTNU’ wanted to go beyond behavior and actually look inside the brain. They fitted
students with sensor-embedded hairnets ; 256 electrodes each ; and tracked their brain activity in
real time as they either handwrote or typed words shown on a screen.
The difference was stark. Writing by hand lit up the brain across the board ; visual processing
regions, sensory areas, and the motor cortex all fired together, creating the kind of rich, cross-
regional connectivity that deepens learning and memory. Typing produced almost none of that. The
same tasks, the same words, but a fraction of the neural engagement.
What makes handwriting so powerful is that it forces your brain to coordinate what you see, what
you feel, and what you do ; all at once. That loop is what builds stronger neural pathways. A
keyboard skips the loop entirely.
And here is a “done for you" way to start today:
Have a creative task you need ChatGPT for? Grab a paper and a pen. Write 5-10 ideas about the
task. Could be starting points, different approaches, titles, endings ; whatever it could be. Then take
the best one and put it into your preferred Al tool.
You would have just trained your memory, creativity, and motor functions, and came out with
something 10x stronger than just Al vomit.
Al is an AMAZING tool, but as with everything ever invented ; if you overindulge or misuse it, you
won't like the results.
Something we should never aim to replace is our minds, because once we do, we cease to be of value.
References:
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/is-ai-dulling-our-minds/
