Navigating the AI Revolution without Losing Your Mind

The greatest casualty of AI might just be the human mind itself

Image: Ironically generated with Grok

We are living in the midst of the AI revolution. Increasingly everything we do is assisted by AI. We navigate with AI. We calculate by AI. We bank with AI. We game by AI. We converse with AI. We code by AI. We paint with AI. We diagnose disease using AI.¹ We sentence criminals utilizing AI.² We imagine new worlds harnessing the power of AI. We inspirationally compose music employing AI. We research using AI and we write with AI—correcting our spelling, fixing our grammar, finishing our sentences, and now even creatively constructing our prose. For those of us who have chosen the path of AI our tasks have become more effortless than ever. Our cognitive workload has been vastly reduced, and we need no longer be burdened by maps, overwhelmed by math, or stuck with struggling to find the appropriate prose to write a college term paper, a persuasive marketing email, an inspiring homily, or even a research article intended for publication.

Soon, self-driving cars and trucks will relieve us of the encumbrance of driving, and AI-powered caregiving Companion Robots will release us of the burden of having to care for our elderly parents or our small children.³ The hope of the AI revolution is that when AI relieves us of all our loads and cares, we will finally have the time and energy to do everything we want to do. Yet, all revolutions have their casualties and the AI revolution is no exception. Unfortunately, the greatest casualty of the AI revolution might just be the human mind itself. As we depend increasingly on AI to accomplish more of our cognitive tasks and to shoulder more of our intellectual burdens, our under-stimulated and under-used neural networks tend to atrophy. Because the central rule of neuroplasticity is “use it or lose it,” when we routinely utilize AI instead of our employing own brains to accomplish cognitive tasks, we weaken our neural circuits and ultimately run the risk of losing our minds.

The Central Rule of a Healthy Brain: Use it or Lose it

Everyone knows that it takes very little effort to get out of shape. All you have to do is relax, sit back, enjoy your entertainment, and stop using your muscles. Sitting around a lot, driving instead of walking, and taking the elevator rather than the stairs are all good ways to make your muscles weaken and atrophy. A couple hours of working out at the gym every week can make up for our lazy habits during the average workday, but many of us are just too busy to fit regular exercise into our schedules. We often choose the path of present convenience even though we know that scientific research has shown that exercise is vital for our physical health and essential for our emotional and mental well-being.

While our brain isn’t made out of muscle tissue, in many ways, it is similar. When we use our brain for strenuous cognitive tasks, it gets stronger, leading to greater cognitive resilience and increased cognitive reserve—qualities that are essential for remembering information, learning new things, solving problems, making decisions, paying attention, focusing, and engaging in social interactions.⁴ Cognitive reserve enables the brain to adjust and compensate for the challenges it faces and protects the brain against cognitive decline. Cognitive resilience is the capacity of the brain to preserve and recover cognitive function (especially in the midst of stress or injury).

As we use and challenge our brains in different ways—with new puzzles, experiences, content, and tasks—our cognitive efforts and experiences literally shape our brain structure. Every time we learn something new, figure something out, practice a skill, solve a problem, or engage in a habit, we are sculpting our neural landscape. When we repeatedly activate the neurons—both old and new—that are associated with specific cognitive tasks, we strengthen the connections between our neurons, making new neural connections, sustaining old neural connections, and creating more efficient pathways for information to travel.

However, when we don’t actively engage our brains with challenging cognitive tasks, the neural pathways weaken, eventually die, and are pruned away. This is known as the “Use It or Lose It” activity-dependent principle of neuroplasticity. This use-it-or-lose-it principle observes that “neural circuits not actively engaged in task performance for an extended period of time begin to degrade.”⁵ Thus, if our currently existing intact brain networks are not used regularly for their specific cognitive tasks, “the cortical networks and the behaviors they support will degrade over time.”⁶

Related to the use-it-or-lose-it principle is the “use it and improve it” principle. According to this second principle of activity-dependent principle of neuroplasticity, cognitive training that drives a specific brain function leads to an enhancement of that function.⁷ In other words, the more we use a particular cognitive ability—given adequate specificity, repetition, and intensity of effort—the better that cognitive ability will become. For example, the more we use our language abilities, math talents, or writing skills—and the more intensely we use them—the better they will get over time.

London Cab Drivers: A Leap Forward in Human Evolution

An instructive example of the neuroplasticity law of “use it and improve it” is found in scientific research investigating the brains of London Cab drivers. Before they can earn their cab driving license, hopeful London cabbies must pass an arduous series of examinations—that only about 50 percent pass—demonstrating that they have expertly memorized all the streets, back alleys, and tourist destinations of the city. Cab drivers in training spend three to four years driving around the city on mopeds, memorizing the labyrinth of streets and hot spots—with all of the intricate interconnections between them—so that they can predict the fastest route from one location in London to another, at any time of day or night, using only their eyes and ears.

Studies on the brains of London taxi drivers discovered that the posterior hippocampi of drivers contained significantly more volume of gray matter (or thinking tissue) than people who were similar in age, education, and intelligence but who did not drive taxis.⁸ In other words, London taxi drivers had much more developed memory centers than their peers who were identical in every other respect. Scientists also found that the increase in the size of the hippocampus was directly proportional to the length of time that the cab driver had been on the job. Additional long-term studies have also clearly shown that it is the navigational demands that stimulate brain development and that it is the intensive training—and continued use—of the neurons in their spatial navigation and memory centers that are responsible for the growth and maintenance of London Cab Drivers’ larger-than-average posterior hippocampi.

Even more recent research has found that taxi drivers use their cognitive resources in a much more efficient—and faster—way than even the current GPS (or Sat Nav) technology and that London cabbies actually prevailed over AI navigation in consistently discovering quicker routes. Unlike Sat Nav (or GPS), which creates an algorithm that calculates every possible route in light of current traffic until it gets to the destination, London taxi drivers rationally plan each route by prioritizing the most challenging areas first and then filling in the rest of the route around these difficult points. Instead of planning routes sequentially, street-by-street, as most people do, London Cab drivers consider the entire network of streets, first arranging the most important junctions on the route, and they do this by employing a number of theoretical metrics to determine what is important.⁹ While AI researchers have—for the moment—been outsmarted by London cab drivers, they hope that learning more about expert human navigators will improve the navigational efficiency of the GPS of the future so that one day AI will finally triumph over London Cab Drivers.

Is GPS the Best Way to Navigate Our Cognitive Future?

Over the last twenty years, Sat Nav or GPS navigation has become ubiquitous. By 2015, 80% of American smartphone owners ages 18-29 routinely used their phones for turn-by-turn driving directions, and over the last ten years, this number has increased among all age groups.¹⁰ Getting lost has now become a thing of the distant past—that is, as long as you have a cell phone signal and a charged battery. Yet, how has all this reliance on GPS navigation impacted our brains? The scientific results thus far have not been encouraging.

While the hippocampi of London taxi drivers expand to new heights as they actively engage their neurons to memorize the streets and navigate the landmarks of the city, similar research has shown that drivers who follow GPS directions do the opposite of actively engaging their brains. A study in Nature Communications compared the brains of regular drivers who navigate manually to those using GPS and found that drivers following turn-by-turn GPS directions actually switch off both their hippocampus (a key brain region involved in memory and navigation) and their pre-frontal cortex (a key part of the brain involved in planning, decision-making, and agency).

Those who relied on memory or manual map-based navigation, on the other hand, actively engaged those parts of the brain to simulate different routes and predict the different outcomes. In particular, when the drivers who navigated manually entered new streets or when the number of navigational options to choose from increased, these drivers experienced large spikes of activity in their hippocampi and prefrontal cortices. For those drivers who followed GPS instructions, however, their hippocampi and prefrontal cortices remained dormant even when confronted with a novel navigational situation.¹¹

Another recent study showed that such cognitive inactivity from continual use of GPS for navigational tasks works to wither away our hippocampi and weaken our spatial memory. It also found that prolonged use of GPS reduces the grey matter density in the hippocampus. These researchers likewise discovered that the spatial capacities of people who have been using GPS for an extended period of time show impairments in other spatial memory abilities that require the hippocampus.

Moreover, the scientists “found that those who used GPS more did not do so because they felt they had a poor sense of direction, suggesting that extensive GPS use led to a decline in spatial memory rather than the other way around.”¹² While there is now no question regarding the negative impact of habitual use of GPS on one’s cognitive capacities for spatial memory, planning, decision-making, and agency, the good news is that we can get back into mental shape if we consistently choose to do so and exert the necessary cognitive effort.

One way to still actively engage your brain while using GPS is to write down the GPS directions and actively search for the cues where you need to turn—as opposed to getting every directional cue piecemeal as you drive. Another way is to only use GPS as a last resort and to be willing to run the risk of getting lost. If you are a long-time GPS user, this may be very difficult at first. Even after taking baby steps to extract yourself from GPS, your brain will feel very tired. However, if your brain is feeling tired, then that is good news. The positive feedback of a tired brain means that you are exerting cognitive effort—and if you exert enough cognitive effort over time, then your brain will grow stronger.

What is Cognitively at Stake when AI is Thinking for us?

Generative AI has taken the world by storm. Recent studies show that nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults aged 18-64 use generative AI on a regular basis and that the American public has adopted the use of generative AI faster than they did the internet or the personal computer. Of the 40% that regularly use Generative AI the primary way in which they use it (at both work and at home) is for writing and communications. From Google Overview to ChatGPT to virtual assistants, AI is now doing our research, answering our questions, keeping our schedules, planning our weeks, and writing our communications and papers.

As we are increasingly letting AI do the thinking for us, though, we are offloading numerous cognitively demanding tasks and even cognitively creative tasks. When we utilize AI more for such tasks, we are using our brains less. When we use our brains less—as we discussed above—we lose our brains as they fall prey to decline associated with cognitive atrophy. Researchers have found that relying too heavily on AI, particularly generative AI, for tasks like decision-making, research, writing, and problem-solving leads to the impairment of higher-order executive functions, such as planning and rational deliberation.¹³

Furthermore, warn neuroscientists, “when AI systems take over cognitive tasks, individuals may experience a decrease in mental engagement and stimulation. The lack of active cognitive participation can lead to a decline in critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and creativity.”¹⁴ When individuals don't actively engage their own neural networks by analyzing information, thinking critically, and solving problems independently, over time, it leads to a decline in their strategic processing, capacity for complex learning, and decision-making faculties—since the neural pathways underlying these functions will weaken due to lack of use. As researchers looking at the interface of AI and human cognition have discovered, “regular utilization of AI dialogue systems is linked to a decline in cognitive abilities, a diminished capacity for information retention, and an increased reliance on these systems for information.”¹⁵

While AI can offer efficiency and convenience, with increased “cognitive offloading,” where AI takes over tasks that used to engage our mental faculties, such convenience and efficiency is purchased at a high cost. The more we utilize artificial intelligence assistants, the more we will “accelerate skill decay among experts and hinder skill acquisition.”¹⁶ Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, may offer impressive capabilities that ease our cognitive loads, but “over-reliance on it for cognitive tasks can lead to the erosion of essential skills.”¹⁷ As the AI revolution continues in full sway then, it is essential for us to find a balance between harnessing AI’s advantages and conserving humankind’s natural cognitive abilities so that we don’t lose our minds.

1. Nafiseh Ghaffar Nia, E. Kaplanoğlu, A. Nasab, “Evaluation of artificial intelligence techniques in disease diagnosis and prediction,” Discover Artificial Intelligence, 3:1 (Jan 30, 2023), 5.

2. Melissa Hamilton, “A ‘black box’ AI system has been influencing criminal justice decisions for over two decades – it’s time to open it up”; https://theconversation.com/a-black-box-ai-system-has-been-influencing-criminal-justice-decisions-for-over-two-decades-its-time-to-open-it-up-200594 The Conversation, 2023

3. Srikanta Padhan, Avilash Mohapatra, Senthil Kumar Ramasamy, Sanjana Agrawal, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics in Elderly Healthcare: Enabling Independence and Quality of Life” Cureus, 15:8 (Aug 3, 2023), e42905; “Will Robotics and AI Be the Future of Elder Care?,”https://www.haaszaltz.com/will-robotics-and-ai-be-the-future-of-elder-care/; “The Future of Robot Nannies” https://www.wired.com/story/roboto-nannies-ethics-liability/

4. Yaakov Stern, Carol A. Barnes , Cheryl Grady , Richard N. Jones , Naftali Raz , “Brain reserve, cognitive reserve, compensation, and maintenance operationalization, validity, and mechanisms of cognitive resilience,” Neurobiology of Aging Volume 83, (November 2019), 124-129.

5. Jeffrey A. Kleim and Theresa A. Jones “Principles of Experience-Dependent Neural Plasticity: Implications for Rehabilitation After Brain Damage,” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing; 51:1 (Feb 2008) S225-39.

6. H. Isabel Hubbard, Lori A. Nelson, Jessica D. Richardson, “Can script training improve narrative and conversation in aphasia across etiology?” Seminars in Speech and Language 41:1 (January 2020):99-124.

7. Kleim and Jones, “Principles of Experience-Dependent Neural Plasticity.”

8. Eleanor A. Maguire , Katherine Woollett, Hugo J. Spiers, “London taxi drivers and bus drivers: A Structural MRI and Neuropsychological Analysis,” Hippocampus 16; (2006) 1091-1101.

9. Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Eva-Maria Griesbauer, Iva K. Brunec, and Hugo J. Spiers, “Expert navigators deploy rational complexity–based decision pre-caching for large-scale real-world planning,” Biophysics and Computational Biology 122:4, (January 23, 2025) e2407814122.

10. Aaron Smith, “Chapter Two: Usage and Attitudes Toward Smartphones” Pew Research Center, (April 1, 2015) https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/04/01/chapter-two-usage-and-attitudes-toward-smartphones/

11. Amir-Homayoun Javadi, Beatrix Emo, Lorelei R. Howard, Fiona E. Zisch, Yichao Yu, Rebecca Knight, Joao Pinelo Silva & Hugo J. Spiers, “Hippocampal and prefrontal processing of network topology to simulate the future.” Nature Communications, (March 2017).

12. L. Dahmani, and V.D Bohbot, “Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation” Scientific Reports. 10:1 (April 2020).

13. Umberto León-Domínguez, “Potential cognitive risks of generative transformer-based AI chatbots on higher order executive functions” Neuropsychology 38:4, (February 2024).

14. Ismail Dergaa, Helmi Ben Saad, Jordan M Glenn, Badii Amamou, Mohamed Ben Aissa, Noomen Guelmami, Feten Fekih-Romdhane, and Karim Chamari, “From tools to threats: a reflection on the impact of artificial-intelligence chatbots on cognitive health,” Frontiers in Psychology, 15 (April 2, 2024), 1259845.

15. Chunpeng Zhai, Santoso Wibowo, and Lily D. Li, “The effects of over-reliance on AI dialogue systems on students' cognitive abilities: a systematic review,” Smart Learning Environments 11: 28 (2024).

16. Brooke N. Macnamara, Ibrahim Berber, M. Cenk Çavuşoğlu, Elizabeth A. Krupinski, Naren Nallapareddy, Noelle E. Nelson, Philip J. Smith, Amy L. Wilson-Delfosse and Soumya Ray, “Does using artificial intelligence assistance accelerate skill decay and hinder skill development without performers’ awareness?” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 9:46 (2024).

17. Souvik Dubey, Ritwik Ghosh, Mahua Jana Dubey, Subhankar Chatterjee, Shambaditya Das, and Julián Benito-León “Redefining Cognitive Domains in the Era of ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Analysis of Artificial Intelligence’s Influence and Future Implications,” Medical Research Archives 12:6 (June 2024) 5383.