By Melissa Hogenboom
Publication Date: 2026-04-20 09:04:00
While studies like this illustrate the short-term effects of LLMs on the brain, the long-term effects are far less clear. The study by Kosmyna and her colleagues provides some insight. Four months after the first study, they asked students to write another essay, but this time those who had used ChatGPT were told to work without LLM support. Neural connectivity in their brains was lower than those who switched in the opposite direction, perhaps indicating that they had not properly engaged with the topics in the first place.
Cognitive decline
Still, LLMs can be a positive tool to aid thinking, but only if we don’t rely on them and outsource our mental tasks in the process, says Vivienne Ming, computational neuroscientist and author of Robot Proof. However, she’s concerned that most people don’t interact with this technology in this way.
Her argument is based on research she conducted for her book, in which Ming asked a group of Berkeley University students to predict…
