lo & slo/summer series 2 of 5
the cognitive debt we don't talk about
an mit media lab study found the chatgpt group's brain activity was still sluggish weeks later, writing without the tool. we use ai every day, which is why the finding belongs in how we work.
in june of 2025 a small team at the mit1 media lab took 54 people, wired them up to EEGs, and asked them to write SAT essays. 3 groups: chatgpt-only, google-only, brain-only. they skipped the usual model benchmark and the usual agi-timeline argument.
the chatgpt group showed the lowest neural engagement across the board. their writing scored lower on the linguistic and behavioral measures the team tracked. and by the end of the 4-session study, most of them had stopped writing entirely. they were copy-pasting the model's output and submitting it.
weeks later, when the chatgpt users were asked to write without the tool, their brain activity was still sluggish. the researchers used the phrase cognitive debt.
we help enterprise product teams get unstuck and ship. we use ai constantly: drafting, research, reformatting specs, generating variants. we'd be hypocrites to tell you to stop. the study is making us think harder about how we use it.
there are 2 kinds of ai usage. one lifts your output past what you could do alone. you still do the thinking, the tool sharpens the artifact. the other skips the thinking entirely. it produces an artifact you couldn't have produced and, more to the point, didn't. the first compounds over time; the second is a loan you pay later.
cal newport2, the georgetown computer-science professor who wrote deep work and slow productivity, calls this the augmentation/automation line. he frames writing as cognitive fitness: what running is to your heart, writing is to your mind. outsourcing the workout does not keep you in shape.
clarai's pitch is shipping in weeks what agencies bill for months, because we use ai well. that sounds like a strange place to write this essay from. it is not a contradiction once you separate the speeds.
going fast on the work does not require going fast on the thinking. the deliverable can run on a tight cycle and the judgment behind it can still come from a slow, well-rested human brain. that is the only way the deliverable stays good. if the human also speeds up, you get convergence. microsoft research and carnegie mellon3 measured exactly that earlier in 2025: heavy ai users produce a less diverse set of outputs for the same task. the work flattens.
so we're trying something across summer 2026. one piece of work a week, no model. strategic memo, discovery question list, retrospective: it does not matter which. the rule is that the muscles stay attached to the brain.
small practice. the mit team's word for the alternative was debt, and that word tracks. you can run a credit card for a while and feel fine. the bill still arrives.