AI Gives You Your Mind Back

A headline says students who use AI are “thinking less” and that claim sounds obvious until you ask a sharper question: less than what? I dig into why so many classroom metrics reward compliance over curiosity, then explain how that kind of boxed-in learning makes AI look like a threat. If the goal is to produce the “right” answer in the “right” format, delegating the busywork to ChatGPT can resemble disengagement. But that may be a signal that the box itself is the problem, not the tool.

We walk through the popular MIT-style study that gets repeated everywhere and talk about what small samples, low-stakes incentives, and boring assignments can do to “neural engagement.” Then we pivot to the research and real-world evidence that gets less attention: human AI collaboration, co-creation, and cognitive synergy. Large language models are great at scanning details, summarizing sources, and surfacing patterns our bias would miss. Humans are great at framing the question, choosing what matters, and imagining new paths forward.

I also connect today’s AI panic to yesterday’s “shortcuts” like calculators, spreadsheets, and search engines. Those tools didn’t erase thinking, they freed people to do higher-level work and more powerful “what if” exploration. If you want a practical way to use AI at work, I share how to prompt for overlooked considerations so you can move faster without losing judgment. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s skeptical about AI, and leave a review with your take: is AI making us lazier or more creative?

Transcript

AI Frees The Mind

Breaking Down The MIT Study

AI Human Synergy Beats Replacement

Creativity Gets Squashed In School

Calculators Spreadsheets And Search Parallels

Better Prompts For Real Work

Embrace AI And Get Help

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Another episode. Another episode of AI Made Simple. I'm Steve Brown, your host. This week we're talking about a topic got me thinking, you know, there's a new report digging around. It says that uh students who use AI are thinking less. And I just have to ask, less than what? Because, you know, if we're being honest, our education system hasn't really uh been a temple of original thought. We've spent decades training kids to be uh to memorize, to conform, to follow instructions, to not think. And we call it critical thinking. But what we really teach is compliance, fill in the blakes, color between the lines, cite your sources, and don't color too loud, be quiet. And now we're worried AI may might make students too dependent. The whole system was built on dependence, dependence on authority, dependence on approval, dependence on doing it the right way. And if the system rewards conformity, then maybe less thinking inside that box is actually the first sign of thinking more outside it. Maybe it's not a crisis, maybe it's a breakthrough. So today I just wanted to cover that. That's it's like um I saw this report, and I think I think it's just more of an excuse to be fearful of AI. It's more of a way, you know, for teachers to try to shame students into using AI. It doesn't help you with your critical thinking. But let me tell you, when they step outside of the university, that business is going to expect them to embrace AI, to use AI, to be really good with AI, because that business knows this is about survival. This is about being relevant in the future. This is about reducing a lot of um things that are expensive to pay humans to do. So um I'm gonna share my screen and let's cover this. No, we're not showing the right screen. That's show business. Share the screen, share the window. Am I showing oh I know what I'm doing wrong. Hang with me. Thinking inside the box at the moment. There we go. So how's that? Didn't we make the trip? We sure did. So look, AI is not going to take a job, but it's going to give you your mind back. And so that you know, what I want to challenge is a narrative about this cognitive decay with new evidence. And it's the conformity metric, you know, students who think less with AI, they're driven by this uh particular report I'll share with you here in a second from uh time or MIT. It's talking about this neural engagement when students delegate works to uh tools like Chat GPT, and so they're like less able to um um to talk about what their report included, but think about that assignment and think about what's going on here what you know. This is a system that wants you to um stay in the lines, go do this, and then give me the answers I'm expecting. Show me your work, but I don't think you should be showing your work, you should be showing your thinking, you shouldn't be showing your questions. It's because these uh tools, these AI tools, they can handle all of the minutiae, they can go out and do all this amazing uh research, but they're not going to be creative. And so when a system punishes creativity, I think uh I think this is this is the opposite of what's going to be needed when you get out into the world, you know, these these tools, AI as an amplifier, a creative amplifier. Let's go look at these. Um your brain on chat GPT. All right, this is a report from um MIT. Okay, and it's talking about, you know, it took 54 participants and it it ran it through this cognitive load during essay writing. Okay, this is hardly a comprehensive giant sampling, 54 participants. But I've heard this particular report repeated, I don't know, about 20 times in the past um several months, and so I wanted to look into it, but you know, it's just saying that LLM users struggle to accurately quote their own work. Well, that's true if you asked me to go get the answer that you're expecting. Yeah, but out of these 54 people, how engaged were they in this whatever this session? Was it really compelling? Was it something interesting? Did it really matter? Of course, they're gonna do something just to uh get the free lunch, make the whatever the get the$20 voucher. So this is this is true. If you have someone that's disengaged, doesn't care, and uh just want to get this done and put to bed, it is it brain-dead minutiae that you're asking this person to be cognitively engaged. Um yeah, so I hardly, I hardly uh that this is not end user case, this is not a business use case. And I would put in the question if it's MIT related or what's the intent, or what's the um what are they trying to do? Who's who who made this study? Will we go look at other studies? Human AI collaboration and creative design evaluating cognitive, and here's the key point synergy. The beauty of these systems is that machines, robots, lms, all of this computer technology is supposed to handle all of the details that we hate. Humans are awful at details. We can we can't go clone uh we can't go through tons of data and stay engaged and see patterns. There, we have a bias. That's why a bias exists, that's why our brains are designed the way they are, so we can quickly reduce the amount of brain energy we're using on this, mind, numbing stuff, and get to the point. Pull out a perspective that's called a bias that exists for a reason. That's a brain power. That's your brain is designed to operate that way. LLMs are designed to handle all of the work that your brain doesn't want to do and show you patterns that your bias would help you overlook. So it in seconds it can go through. But the findings suggest that optimal cognitive synergy arises not from replacing human input by designing co-creative environments where AI acts as a dynamic partner. Well, let's just let's just rephrase this. The findings suggest that using AI in a business environment where we just need the answer and we need to take care of the customer, we need to get the product out the door, um, acts as a dynamic partner. Punishing, so business punishes poor performance. Well, AI boosts performance, and people just want the answer. Give me the answer. This gives you the answer, this gets you the answer. The human can focus on what a human does best, and AI can just go through all the details and a minutiae that feels punishing. We design these uh um work environments. Be here at eight, you clock out at five, and you got to do go through your email, you got to fill in these forms, you got to do all of these things that's called productivity when reality it feels almost like punishment, right? And so, though, human subjects in the experiment set in the context of creative writing, we found that AI and assistance improve productivity across all models, collaboration design significantly influenced output quality, user satisfaction, and content characteristics. This is nowhere in educational curriculum. This is on this is Street Smarts right here. This is where business um, this is where it meets the road, where the rubber meets the road. These are why these reports like this are not realistic in a business situation, it's just a scare tactic that makes it a competitive advantage for your business when you, as a leader in your business, realize that expecting your team to embrace and outsource all of the stuff that pulls that makes work. Um just mind numbing, mind numbing, think about it, mind numbing details. That's what LLMs excel at. The other report here, exploring creativity and human AI co-creation, a comparative study across design experience. These are all of all reports that you can go look up. But there are more, we're not seeing these reports shared in the media. Why? Well, it's not fear-based, it's not click-worthy, right? And it's not protecting a status quo and an education system that's finding itself more and more out of date. Our world is lurching forward. So human AI collaboration and creative design, creativity in the age of AI, these are all expansions of ideation fluency, and that's the main thing here. You know, as humans, our best work is when we get to dream as kids, where where we go and play and we build these things and create these imaginary worlds, and then as soon as we get into the educational realm, that's all squashed. Don't dream, pay attention, do your do your work, turn it in and conform. And it's all of this creative uh ideation, problem solving, dreaming. What if, what if is washed out, and so this is releasing us, this is offering us a chance to dream again, to be more creative, to stop thinking with compliance and start thinking in what if, what if what our expectations right now in what's called compliance is um crushing? It's not a competitive advantage. You think about every cognitive tool that we uh used throughout history is calculators. This I'm sure there is report I didn't go look it up, I didn't ask AI to go see, but don't you think there are reports about when calculators, your kids couldn't take calculators to school because it makes them not think about math? And yet, higher level math, calculators freed us up to do algebra, to do all the other math, to start figuring out solutions to problems, not making sure that your numbers lined up below the line. Spreadsheets, can you imagine that it was called lazy accounting, but it birthed modeling and forecasting? You can take all this data, dump it in there, and do a bunch of what ifs. That's what started happening. No, no, you gotta you gotta keep your pencil sharp, write it down in the book, turn the page, erase, cross that out. That's that flipped and started making this a valuable business use case. Search engines, you're supposed to go to the library, go through the the card catalog, walk over and get the book. Nope. This is supposed to have killed curiosity. No, no, this is how the whole world changed in getting information, and so originally these tools looked like shortcuts to those protecting the old system, but they were the stepping stones, and so the real value proposition in the age of compliance, being compliance is over. This is we don't need permission to to go to dream, we just need to put in and think about what if, what if here's what I'm working on. This this is the essence of a beautiful use case is go, here's what I'm working on, but here's what I'm concerned about, and here's what people are saying. But what are other considerations that I haven't considered? And what does the LLM do? It goes and does the research and brings in other options for you to take and go, I didn't know that. And then what does your brain do? It starts to be more creative. You're using you're you're having expectations that you didn't have before. That's the beauty of using AI. Businesses don't want to pay you to do go through every email and reply to every email when you don't need to. That used to be you need to go clock in and just do something to prove you're working. That's not a competitive advantage for a business, that's not solving problems, and that's not the best use of you as a creative being. AI releases you and it helps you to be able to get your thinking back, to get your mind back, to get you dreaming again, to get you to start being creative. Use it, use it to do this. You expect your people to play and use AI and come up with solutions that you, as a leader of your business, you don't need to think of everything. Just go, here's what my vision is, here's where we're going, here's our challenges. What are options that we can consider that we haven't considered before? And then take it and start to run with it. And that's the beauty of this um this AI revolution. Embrace it, get in there and play with it. Don't listen to everybody saying, Oh, it's so bad. Yeah, so were calculators, so were toothbrushes when they are invented. Don't use that toothbrush, use the stick. Use the stick. Don't you think? I'm Steve Brown. This is AI Made Simple. AI is not gonna take a job. It'll give you your mind back, it'll give you your creativity back. We'll see you on another episode of AI Made Simple. Let me know if you need some help with a custom GPT. ROI Online.com. Check it out. Get help with a custom GPT. Or maybe you just need to go to a clarity session to see how we can help your business get a plan to start implementing AI. That's a wrap.