We Are Forgetting How to Think

The creativity and imperfection of the human mind is the latest casualty of the AI revolution. 

I used to get things wrong in interesting ways. I'd misremember a historical date and build an entire argument around it, only to unravel it myself three days later in the shower. I'd chase a half-formed idea through four books and a legal pad before arriving somewhere unexpected — occasionally brilliant, more often just somewhere. That somewhere, it turns out, was the point. The struggle was the education, the wrong turns were the texture, and the confusion was, quietly, the method. Nobody told me this. I had to think my way into understanding it, which feels almost too on-the-nose to say out loud. But something is changing — I can feel it the way you feel a muscle you've stopped using, not as pain but as absence. We have built tools of astonishing intelligence and placed them in the palms of our hands, and they are, with tremendous patience and zero judgment, relieving us of the one burden that was secretly keeping us human: the struggle to think.

Here’s the sad part: the previous paragraph was written entirely by AI. Specifically, Claude’s Sonnet 4.6. This is the prompt I gave: Write me an opening paragraph for a blog post, talking about this topic: ‘We Are Forgetting How to Think: The creativity and imperfection of the human mind is the latest casualty of the AI revolution.’ Include some personal reflection, slight humor, and impeccable writing. I want it to be undetectable as AI writing. 

Ironically, AI made a compelling case for why it is causing a decline in deep thinking. But that paragraph feels, in a distinct way, soulless. There is something missing. So, I’m going to start this essay from the beginning, in my own voice. Here it is:

Thinking. When was the last time you sat, deeply and curiously, in your thoughts? For me, there are only two areas of my life that allow me the space to truly process in this way: reading the Bible, and writing. There is an ancient monastic practice introduced by Saint Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century AD called lectio divina, meaning “divine reading.” It involves a four-step process of immersing yourself in the scripture, allowing yourself to read, reflect, respond, and rest. This year, I have tried to adopt this process as part of my weekly routine. Sounds easy, right? It’s not. Oftentimes, I find myself getting distracted, confused, or bored. It is quite challenging to sit, in silence, meditating on what I have read. But that’s the point. 

Somewhere in the last few decades, our culture came to the (incorrect) conclusion that difficulty is to be avoided. The false equivalency goes like this: hard = bad. Yes, it is much more comfortable to spend your time and energy doing things that require neither time nor energy, but this logic is flawed. Oftentimes, true growth and learning only happens after substantial challenge, either internally or externally. This trend can be seen on college campuses, where students and professors display less willingness to engage with ideas they disagree with. It can be seen in our government, where partisan politics have gotten to the point where it is easier to avoid and attack the other side than attempt to work with them. It can be seen in our families, where the #NoContact movement has encouraged individuals to end “toxic” relationships, often with parents or siblings. While this is a difficult trend to observe, most of these individuals had the opportunity to grow up in an environment where laborious thought and reasoning was required. Today’s kids –  going through school in an age where AI LLMs are progressing faster than our ability to adapt curricula to them – are not simply avoiding deep thinking, they are replacing it. 

Plato anticipated this concern over two millennia ago in his Phaedrus dialogue, where Socrates imagines a conversation between the inventor of writing and the King of Egypt, the god Thamus. Thamus warns that the advent of writing, and its replacement of oral tradition, will create "forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." If this was true of writing, how much more does it relate to the mental shortcuts we use every day with AI? 

There is a clear neurological benefit to arriving at a thought. Struggling with conflicting ideas, writing and rewriting, being wrong and having to try again, all of these are optimized out by AI; we can simply prompt a chatbot to give us the finished product. Researchers at MIT wanted to study the effects on brain activity across three writing methods for essay production: Brain-only, web search engine, or AI LLM (ChatGPT). Using an electroencephalogram, or EEG, they monitored activity across different regions of the brain. They also evaluated memory encoding and cognitive agency. Across all metrics, participants who used AI had less neuron activation, less ability to recall essay themes, content, or quotes, and felt less connected to the final product they produced than in the other two groups. Researchers noted, “If users rely heavily on AI tools, they may achieve superficial fluency but fail to internalize the knowledge or feel a sense of ownership over it.” 

This is not to say that AI is all bad, or that we should never use it. In my own life, I have found a number of very helpful uses for AI. The important thing is to figure out how to use it as a tool and not as a crutch. It should never be used to supersede hard, deep, involved thought and reasoning. This is one of the things that makes us distinctly human; the ability to generate novel ideas – ideas that are uniquely ours as a result of lived experiences, knowledge, and wisdom – is not something we should take for granted. This is precisely what we use to grow, to change our minds, to learn, to love, to live. In a world where efficiency and output are valued above everything else, I fear that our humanity, and the imperfection that comes with it, might be lost. That would be a great loss, indeed. 

In Japan, a country renowned for its tradition of pottery, there is a practice known as kintsugi. Sometimes, during the process of creating pottery, a piece is broken. Most potters, especially those in the Western tradition, would see this as an opportunity to start over and achieve perfection. In Japan, according to the tradition of kintsugi, this brokenness is a chance to highlight the process of creation. The potter meticulously puts the pieces together, mending them with gold or silver, creating a final product where imperfections and brokenness are not hidden or abandoned, but given the chance to shine through. My own fumbling through lectio divina, the distraction, the confusion, the starting over, is something like that. So is the essay that has been rewritten three times, the argument that finally clicks after days of struggle, the debate between professor and student, the relationship that survives a hard conversation. 

I think there is something to be said for embracing the process; the easy and the difficult, the fast and the slow.

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

– Plutarch