**ChatGPT: MIT Confirms Brainrot - 9 Dec 2025**

By Kieren Nicolas Lovell
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/INTRO/

I am old enough to know that before Google, we had something called
'man' pages and you had to read, consume, and try. Then came ChatGPT.

Scientists have been thinking for a while what effect this has on
the human brain. We now know. 

MIT have confirmed that yes, perhaps, just maybe, offloading your
entire cognitive process to a robot might have side-effects.

Shocking.

THE SETUP: THREE GROUPS ENTER, ONE GROUP REMEMBERS NOTHING

MIT split participants into three noble tribes:

(1) Brain-only  
(2) Search-engine  
(3) Let GPT-4 do the heavy lifting

The results? Well

The Brain-only group lit up the EEG like a Christmas tree. The
Search group engaged enough neurons to suggest something was
happening behind the eyes. The LLM group? Their brains idled..

| brain > /dev/null

Participants using ChatGPT then attempted to quote their own
essays. They failed. Magnificently. Across sessions, the LLM group
displayed quoting accuracy that would embarrass a malfunctioning
Speak & Spell. Meanwhile, the Brain-only group remembered their own
words - a live-action remake of the Google-effect story about
remembering *where* rather than *what* [2].

/COGNITIVE DEBT: BUY NOW, PAY LATER/

Every time you let an LLM construct your ideas, you accrue what
we call cognitive debt [1]. In old-fashioned terms, you are
shrinking the part of cognitive load that actually builds schemas
and understanding, and maximising the part where you let the tool
carry you along [3].

Over repeated sessions, the LLM group showed neural connectivity
dropping toward the complexity level of a screensaver [1]. But the
best bit comes in Session 4, when the AI-dependent participants are
suddenly told: now write without GPT.

Their brains have a little bit of a segfault and panics.

Connectivity drops & engagement collapses. The whole system behaves
as if someone unplugged their brain. It is a small, slightly tragic
demo of what happens when agency is steadily offloaded to a machine
that never sleeps and never argues with you [4].

/SEARCH GROUP/

The Search-engine group, ironically, looked the most like humans.
They activated memory, decision-making, prior knowledge, actual
learning [1].

Scrolling past ten SEO-choked blog posts turns out to be more
cognitively stimulating than typing rewrite this but smarter into
an LLM. The friction of hunting, comparing, doubting, clicking back
and forth is cognitive work. It is annoying, but it is thinking [2],
[3].

/ONTOLOGY, N-GRAMS, AND THE GREAT HOMOGENISATION/

GPT essays converged into a smooth paste of identical structure and
phrasing. MIT calls it NER and n-gram homogeneity [1].

Human-written essays? Chaotic, inconsistent, but charming. The sort of
thing only a real brain would emit  exactly the kind of noisy,
inefficient, deeply human mess that automation keeps trying to iron
flat [4].

/THE INTERNET IS ABOUT TO GET MORE BORING/

If MITs EEG readouts are correct, our future is an ocean of prose
that all sounds like a corporate assistant trying to reassure its
manager it is definitely working.

As people lean entirely on LLMs, their ability to resume independent
thought decays. Cognitive scaffolding collapses. We are walking
straight into what you might call the *tyranny of convenience* [5]:
the path of least resistance, where thinking becomes an optional
add-on rather than the default.

This paper simply caught it happening live, that we see daily
when reading our LinkedIn feeds... [1], [4].

The future's not bright. The future is thick. 

REFERENCES

[1] N. Kosmyna et al., Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of
Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing, 2025.
Available:  
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872  
(Accessed: 7 Dec 2025).

[2] S. Sparrow, D. Liu, and M. Wegner, Google Effects on Memory,
*Science*, vol. 333, no. 6043, pp. 776778, 2011. Available:  
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1207745 
science.1207745

[3] J. Sweller, Cognitive Load Theory, *Psychol. Learn. Motiv.*,  
vol. 55, pp. 3776, 2011. Available:  
https://doi.org/10.1016/  
B978-0-12-387691-1.00002-8

[4] C. C. Walther, Reclaiming Cognitive Autonomy in the Age of 
AI, Centre for International Governance Innovation, Aug. 19, 2025. 
https://www.cigionline.org/articles/reclaiming-cognitive-autonomy-
in-the-age-of-ai/

[5] T. Wu, The Tyranny of Convenience, *New York Times*, 2018.
Available:  
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-
convenience.html