Your Brain, Outsourced

Day and night, drivers glance down at glowing blue lines on their phone screens as they navigate traffic, intersections, roundabouts and turns. For many, reaching a destination has become an exercise in following instructions rather than building a mental map of the landscape unfolding around them. Without the Global Positioning System (GPS), they might struggle to retrace their routes on their own.

Six years ago, Véronique Bohbot, Professor of Psychiatry and memory expert at McGill University in Canada, probed a deceptively simple question: what happens when people stop navigating for themselves? In her 2020 research (bit.ly/GPS-spatial-memory), she found that people who habitually used GPS technology showed poorer spatial memory and were less likely to use the hippocampus – a region of the brain linked to memory and navigation. Her findings suggested that reliance on GPS appeared to shift people away from understanding the layouts of places and towards following the directions provided.

Since then, scientists have extended the scope of such research beyond navigation into broader aspects of human cognition – memory, reasoning, skills, and decision-making – as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems have entered everyday life. GenAI systems now help people write emails, answer homework questions, summarise meetings and documents, and produce software.

As GenAI – technology that can create new content from patterns learned from existing data – is increasingly used to outsource memory, analysis, and decision-making, educators worry that students who write essays using such aids might lose their critical-thinking skills. Software engineers debate whether outsourced code completion might erode their own problem-solving abilities. In Poland, gastroenterology researcher Marcin Romańczyk and colleagues have observed (bit.ly/colonoscopy-AI-deskill) that experienced doctors who routinely used AI-assisted colonoscopy became worse at detecting possible precancerous growths without the AI support. The average detection rate fell from 28% before the use of AI to 22% afterwards. In AI-assisted colonoscopies, the detection rate was 25%. Romańczyk says he was surprised by the extent of the decline. Such findings have raised fears that outsourcing mental tasks may not only change how humans work but also diminish underlying skills themselves.