What do the studies actually show about AI and thinking?
The losses that replicate across studies are specific: recall, critical thinking, and effort. A 2025 study of hundreds of adults found that heavier AI tool use correlated with lower critical thinking scores. A Stanford-affiliated survey found ChatGPT users reporting more procrastination and less effort. None of this says AI makes you stupid. It says heavy reliance has a measurable cost.
The coverage is hard to miss. The Harvard Gazette asked whether AI is dulling our minds, BBC asked whether chatbots could be making you stupider, and Business Insider reviewed the same research. These are correlations, not proof of cause and effect, but the pattern is consistent, and Oxford chose "brain rot" as its 2024 word of the year.
On Reddit, threads titled "does anyone else feel like AI is causing brain rot?" fill with the same confession: people finish a chatbot conversation and cannot reconstruct how they got there. That experience, thinking without retaining, is the practical definition of the problem.
Why does using AI feel like thinking?
It feels like thinking because it reuses the same motions: you set a goal, read the output, and decide what to do next. What drops out is the middle, the part where you hold the material yourself. Researchers call this cognitive offloading: handing a mental task to an external tool instead of doing it in your own head.
The habit has deep roots. In a 2011 study, people who expected to have access to information later remembered where to find it instead of the information itself, an effect researchers named after the search engine. MIT Sloan researchers describe a similar "AI gravity": attention gets pulled toward generated content and away from the original.
That is why reading a summary can feel exactly like reading the book, until someone asks what the book was about. The Reddit confession "I lost the ability to read" describes this precisely: the comprehension loop still runs, but the storage step is skipped.
Which skills decline first: recall, critical thinking, or writing?
Recall goes first, because it is the step AI replaces most often. You stop storing details and start storing locations: the tab, the chat. Critical thinking follows, because evaluating a claim is easy to hand over. Writing declines last: the more text a model produces for you, the less prose you generate yourself.
None of this is mysterious. Memory research has shown for decades that recall is maintained by use: retrieval practice, pulling information out of your head instead of re-reading it, is among the most replicated findings in the field. The shallowing hypothesis, Nicholas Carr's argument in The Shallows, predicted this pattern for the internet generally.
AI accelerates the same curve. The r/nosurf confession "I mourn the person I could've been" captures the feeling, but the evidence suggests the skills are not gone. They are underused, and underuse is reversible with practice.
Can deliberate practice keep your own thinking sharp?
Yes, and this is where the evidence is strongest. The skills that decline with offloading, recall, evaluation, and generation, are exactly the skills that retrieval practice trains. The testing effect, confirmed in hundreds of experiments, is simple: pulling information out of memory strengthens it more than re-reading it. Practicing that loop keeps your own apparatus in the game.
The practice is not exotic. Read a passage once, close it, and write down everything you remember. Then reopen it and check. The check shows what you actually absorbed versus what you nodded along with, and that gap is the part of your mind you do not want to outsource.
This is not a promise that you will get smarter or remember everything. It is a way to keep using the skills you already have so they stay yours, the same method the active-recall threads on r/IWantToLearn keep arriving at: stop re-reading, start recalling.
How do you use AI without outsourcing your thinking?
Use the rule: write first, then check. Draft your own answer, summary, or opinion before you open the chatbot, then use the AI to compare, correct, and extend. The prompt you write is the product of your thinking. The model's reply is a second reader, not a first writer.
The same rule applies to reading with AI. Read the source yourself first, then ask the model to quiz you on it or argue the opposite position, rather than summarize it for you. If you reach for the chatbot before forming any answer of your own, that is the moment offloading happens.
Keep the tool in the checking role and it stops being a substitute for comprehension. It becomes what tools are supposed to be: something that makes your own thinking faster to verify.
What is a 10-minute daily protocol you can start today?
Ten minutes, three moves: five minutes reading something dense with no other tabs open. Three minutes writing a summary from memory, no peeking. Two minutes checking your summary against the source and noting what you missed. That is the whole protocol, and it is retrieval practice on real material.
Consistency beats intensity: one short session a day does more than a heroic hour on Sunday. If you want this structure built for you, Absorb is a daily comprehension practice on the App Store: short reading, listening, and visual sessions where you answer from memory and see what you missed.
When someone asks next week what you actually read, you will have an answer that came from your own head. That is the whole point of the protocol, and it costs ten minutes.