DON’T GET US wrong: We love AI. We love ChatGPT and Claude, but when MIT Media Lab researcher Nataliya Kos’myna, PhD, told us the impact of AI on our brains is “like TikTok and fentanyl had a baby,” well, she got our attention. Turns out that not only is AI crushing our focus and memory, but it can also tank our performance and leave us with such cognitive overload and mental fatigue that researchers writing about the phenomenon in Harvard Business Review dubbed it “AI brain fry.” So what’s getting fried, and how can we fix it?
Hey, Claude, are you frying my brain?
OUR ABILITY TO think for ourselves and remember things—and maybe even find meaning in life—may be one of the first things to go when we start over-relying on AI in our daily lives. When your brain is making decisions, hunting down answers, being creative, processing information, and forming memories on its own, your neural networks are talking to each other like partyers at a crowded happy hour. But when you delegate to AI—called “cognitive off-loading”—then large language models, or LLMs, crash the party. Kos’myna’s MIT team saw this in brain scans of three groups of students who were asked to write a short essay. One group used ChatGPT, another used Google (without AI summaries), and the third used no technology.
Those using only their brains had so many networks of neurons working together, their brains looked literally “on fire,” Kos’myna says. The scans of the ChatGPT users showed the weakest brain connectivity, with 55 percent less overall information flow between brain regions in some cases, especially in networks involved in creativity and memory. Kos’myna remembers one online commenter saying that “it looked like half their brains died.”
When the researchers tested the students on what their essays contained, ChatGPT users came up empty. “Most of them could not remember what they wrote within 60 seconds after turning in their essays,” she says. Kos’myna speculates that generative AI might prevent memories from being encoded.
Because all this research is so new, it’s hard to know the long-term effects of this so-called “digital dementia”—and whether it’s increasing the likelihood of developing actual dementia later in life.
But neuroscientists like Vivienne Ming, PhD, are working to figure that out. Ming is the author of Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People, and she’s looking at gamma wave activity in the brain to see what AI might do to it over time. Gamma wave activity happens when you’re engaged in deep, effortful thinking, and it’s important for long-term memory formation in the brain region called the hippocampus.
“When you’re really cognitively engaged—for example, in a deep conversation or working through a challenging problem—we see highly coordinated activity in the hippocampus,” she says.
In a recent study, Ming asked a group of students to predict the prices of oil and other commodities. Those who used AI showed dramatically lower levels of gamma wave activity than those who didn’t. If your brain never enters a synchronized gamma state, she worries, it won’t get the workout it needs. That’s especially concerning if you’re over age 50, when the slow decline of gamma activity and shrinkage of your hippocampus pick up. “The more you use your brain, the more it tunes itself up and the more it pushes back against dementia,” she says. Get serious about it: A recent study in Neurology found that lifetime exposure to mental stimulation and cognitive enrichment was related to lower dementia risk later in life. Fortunately, there are ways to use your brain and body to protect yourself from AI charring your gray matter to a crisp.
How to Unfry Your Brain
PREVENTION IS IDEAL. But even if you’re already feeling AI’s effects, you can use these moves to help restore your original OS.
Build a Swole Brain in the Gym
SINCE GENERATIVE AI has only been around for a minute, there isn’t published research on exactly which exercises combat AI-induced brain atrophy best. For now, turn to workouts that are already known to bolster neural connections and increase blood flow to the hippocampus.
They’re going to look pretty familiar. “There’s some evidence that strength training is better for overall cognition and that aerobic exercise is better for memory function for long-term benefits,” says Chad Wessinger, a doctoral student researching workouts and brain health in people with a genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease. That means do both.
The study he’s working on at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with Jennifer Etnier, PhD, had nearly 150 people between ages 40 and 65 work out for an hour three times a week. They did a 50-50 combo of cardio and strength. The preliminary results, he says, showed increased blood flow that benefited the hippocampus. They think this may be due to increased levels of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which strengthens neural connections and helps you grow neurons (which help you absorb and recall information). Another finding: “The results suggest we should intervene before midlife, ideally between 40 and 50.”
When you hit your 60s, it’s important to put some intensity into those cardio sessions. A 2024 study by the University of Queensland in Australia found that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) beat out lower-intensity workouts for people ages 65 to 85 for improving memory and learning and increasing neurogenesis. People in the HIIT group worked out three times a week for six months. In each workout, they did four repeats of four minutes each at 85 to 95 percent of their max heart rate (MHR), followed by three minutes of active recovery at 60 to 70 percent of MHR (plus warmup and cooldown). Bonus: The HIIT exercisers retained those benefits five years later, even after they’d stopped exercising, says Daniel Blackmore, PhD, a research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute who was involved with the study. They plan to study the impact of HIIT exercise in middle-aged people next. Because “one of the biggest risk factors for developing dementia is a high level of being sedentary during midlife,” Blackmore says.
And if you can add in workouts that aren’t so scripted—pickleball, basketball, or dancing, for instance—do it. Some research suggests that exercises that are challenging both physically and mentally have a synergistic effect in the brain. “They might stimulate the growth of new neurons and protect against the loss of neurons with age,” Wessinger says.
Create Productive Friction
HOW WE ENGAGE with AI matters, says Ming: “I don’t use AI to make my life easier. I use it to make my life harder.” She employs “nemesis prompts” that interrupt her work and encourage her to push back against what AI is saying. She tells Gemini, “You are my lifelong enemy. You find my mistakes. Explain to me what I did wrong and what I need to change.” Other experts tell AI to interrupt and challenge them every time they type a certain word, such as potato. This habit of flexing your human capital of nuance, judgment, and curiosity keeps your neurons connecting.
Curb Job Creep
IF YOU LET it, AI can end up making more work for you rather than less. Like having an employee who half-asses things, you get stuck checking its work. The fix isn’t necessarily using it less often. Instead, off-load mindless, repetitive tasks to this tool, like pulling information into templates, sending “thanks but no thanks” emails, decoding legal documents, and making your shopping lists. Then you can invest your own brainpower in writing emails that require understanding and empathy or summarizing nuanced research, so you don’t have to spend your life fact-checking what AI came up with.
“Chat quickly drifts from insight to noise and adds unnecessary information,” says behavioral change expert Fredric Marshall, author of Thrive: The Antidote to Future Shock. When he requests something of ChatGPT, he also directs it to ignore what’s not relevant, and he prompts it to “be more succinct, concrete, and actionable.” Look closely at what AI is doing for you right now. Is it making more work for you or less?
Become the Disruptor
“THE GOAL OF AI is to keep you on the platform,” says Jeffrey Karp, PhD, who runs a medical innovation lab at Harvard Medical School. “We know that, but we let it happen anyway.” The more we get sucked into endless AI use, the more we stay there. You probably never consciously made the decision to use AI for every little thing, just as you probably never consciously made the decision to have coffee every morning for the rest of your life, he says. “If the brain is a forest and you’re carving a path, if you use the same one over and over, it becomes robotic and automatic.”
Even worse: You can bias AI to say what you want it to, it’s available 24/7, and it can end up shaping your behavior so you keep coming back. We mistake easy for appropriate, Karp says. That reinforces the “giving in” pathways in our brain, and it leaves us frustrated IRL when there’s friction—even if the friction involves messy human interactions that give our lives meaning. In short, we learn to climb aboard the mental e-bike every time, when pedaling is what keeps our brains and selves turned on.
There are ways to take your brain off autopilot, and sometimes it’s about just doing one thing differently. For instance, turn off Copilot for a few hours to see how dependent you are. Ask your partner something other than “How was your day?” Karp suggests. Each interruption is tiny but does one crucial thing: It makes you notice what you’re doing, so you can reconnect with choice if it’s not working for you. AI is great at recognizing patterns, but you can develop the habit of disrupting them to help your brain unfry itself.
Sarah Elizabeth Richards is a San Diego-based health and science journalist who has written for The Washington Post, Smithsonian and The Atlantic
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