Your Brain on ChatGPT? What MIT’s New Study Means for Educators

Groundbreaking research shows how AI tools may be dulling student thinking—unless we change how they’re used.

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Last week, researchers at MIT’s Media Lab dropped a study that has the education world buzzing. It’s called “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, and the headline is clear: students who rely heavily on AI for writing may actually experience less brain activity.

Using EEG scans to measure engagement during writing tasks, the study found students who used ChatGPT to write essays showed:

• Significantly lower brain connectivity

• Reduced originality

• Weaker recall of their own work

Even after switching back to writing without AI, those students' brain engagement stayed low. In contrast, students who started by writing on their own and then used ChatGPT to revise retained higher cognitive activity and more ownership over their ideas.

This isn’t just a tech headline—it’s a wake-up call for how we integrate AI into the classroom and library. We’ve been so focused on what ChatGPT can do for students, but this study urges us to ask: What is it doing to them?