Humans are remarkable. Since the dawn of time, we’ve been pulling off memory feats that border on the superhuman.
I play chess, so let’s start there. You’ve probably heard of blindfold chess—it’s a stunt where grandmasters play entire games without seeing the board. In 2016, Grandmaster Timur Gareyev set a jaw-dropping world record: 48 blindfolded games played simultaneously [1].
Take a moment to picture that. At any given time, he was tracking the positions of 48 different boards in his mind, calculating hundreds of possible moves, and updating each imaginary board.
Most of us struggle with a single game even with our eyes wide open. What Gareyev did was truly superhuman.
And as remarkable as this feat is, it’s just one of countless examples of what the human brain is capable of.
Every major leap in history—electricity, flight, vaccines, space exploration, software—began as nothing more than a thought in our brains.
The human brain is the engine of modern civilization.
But to solve complex problems, we have to push it. We need to wrestle with complexity for long, focused hours. That means sitting with hard questions, letting them simmer, and coming back to them again and again. It means discussing them with peers, mapping them out on paper, finding evidence, and then questioning that evidence—testing it for flaws, for contradictions, for bias.
Sometimes it even means scrapping our conclusions and starting from scratch.
This process isn’t fast or clean, and it’s certainly not comfortable.
But this is what real thinking looks like.
In psychology, it’s called cognitive load—the mental effort required to reason and push through difficult problems. It’s the feeling of your brain working hard, like muscles under tension.
And just like muscles, the brain grows stronger when it lifts heavy things and when it “suffers through” long runs of focus and clarity.
That’s how we got smarter. And that’s how we continue to get smarter.
The Age Of Cognitive Offloading Is Here
You load your brain—it grows.
You don’t load it—not only does it stop growing, it starts to atrophy.
Unfortunately, that’s the real danger today because we no longer need to lift heavy mental loads. All we need to do… is click.
We’ve entered the age of cognitive offloading, where thinking has become optional. Need a summary of The Grapes of Wrath or Thinking, Fast and Slow? No need to read—just ask ChatGPT. Need to solve a problem or make a decision? Let your AI co-pilot handle it.
Cognitive offloading happens when we shift mental work to external tools—like using Gen AI tools to think, recall, or decide for us.
Is it convenient? Without doubt.
But convenience always exacts a cost.
I believe cognitive offloading is a real and present danger. And in the next section, I’ll walk you through four recent studies (from 2024–2025) that show just how serious the impact might be: from weakening our critical thinking to dulling our memory and quietly eroding our cognitive edge in a highly competitive world.
What The Research Says
1. Study Finds AI Use May Reduce Critical Thinking in Students [2]
A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (May 2025) examined how generative AI tools are being used in educational settings. While the study acknowledged certain benefits, it also flagged serious concerns.
Result: Students who relied heavily on AI showed lower engagement in tasks that required analysis, reasoning, and original thought.
Bottom-line: Without proper guidance, AI can, and will, erode critical thinking.
2. AI Use Encourages “Cognitive Offloading” and Reduces Deep Thinking [3]
A 2025 research paper from Microsoft looked at how people—like software engineers, marketers, and students—use AI tools in their daily work.
Result: They found that people weren’t just using AI to get things done. They were also letting AI decide what tasks to focus on, how to solve problems, and even make choices that involved right and wrong—often without checking if the answers made sense.
Bottom-line: The researchers noticed a six-step pattern where people slowly stopped thinking for themselves. In the final stage, called “metacognitive surrender,” users just accepted whatever the AI said without questioning it. (I wrote about this in the article “Hard Skills for the AI Age.”)
3. Teachers Warn that AI Is Causing Cognitive Offloading in Classrooms [4]
In a March 2025 article, The Guardian reported that teachers are warning about students relying too much on ChatGPT to finish their work. Instead of working through ideas, many students let AI do the thinking for them.
Result: Students weren’t just using AI for help—they were using it to skip the thinking part. That meant less time spent understanding, reflecting, or building strong arguments.
Conclusion: When students rely on AI to do the thinking, it leads to cognitive offloading—they finish the task, but miss the learning.
4. Copy-Paste vs. Chatting with AI: It Makes a Big Difference [5]
A 2024 study in the Journal of Educational Computing Research looked at how students used ChatGPT during programming tasks. One group worked the usual way—in pairs. The other group used ChatGPT more like a partner, asking it questions and having back-and-forth conversations.
Result: The ChatGPT group was more focused, more interested, and showed a deeper understanding of what they were doing.
Conclusion: When students used ChatGPT like a thinking partner, they stayed more engaged and developed stronger thinking skills.
Opt for Active, Intentional Use
Generative AI isn’t the villain here—and few of the studies above agree. I certainly agree that it’s one of the most remarkable tools we’ve ever built. The fact that ChatGPT is now among the top 10 most visited websites globally tells you everything you need to know about its utility.
But just like using a chess engine or a calculator all the time, the problem isn’t the tool—it’s the overdependence.
I learned to do long division by hand before touching a calculator. Had I offloaded the task to calculators from day one, my number-crunching faculties would be far weaker today.
Similarly, there are multiple reports of coders experiencing a decline in coding proficiency when using AI coding tools regularly.
It’s no different for the rest of us. If you constantly offload tasks that exercise your focus, memory, or reasoning muscles, you’ll find yourself more and more dependent on AI. And in time, you lose the capacity and motivation to rebuild those cognitive skills.
So, the next time you fire up ChatGPT or any Gen AI tool, try these:
👉 Make it a conversation, not a crutch
👉 Let it extend your thinking, not replace it
👉 Train your brain first by thinking about the topic and then use the tool to dive deeper
The future will belong to those who can think deeply and use AI skillfully. If you allow these tools to think for you, they absolutely will.
But the cost will be a slower brain—and over time, a shrinking paycheck.
References
[1] Timur Gareyev Breaks Blindfold Chess World Record.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/feb/10/timor-gareyev-48-chess-games-blindfolded-riding-exercise-bike-leonard-barden
[2] Study Finds AI Use May Reduce Critical Thinking in Students
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04919-4
[3] AI Use Encourages Cognitive Offloading and Reduces Deep Thinking
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-critical-thinking-self-reported-reductions-in-cognitive-effort-and-confidence-effects-from-a-survey-of-knowledge-workers/
[4] Teachers Warn that AI Is Causing Cognitive Offloading in Classrooms
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/02/students-use-of-ai-spells-death-knell-for-critical-thinking
[5] Copy-Paste vs. Chatting with AI: It Makes a Big Difference
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360131525001241
