The Brain on ChatGPT
Hey Rewire Collective!
Welcome to this week's newsletter! We’re chatting all things social media and ChatGPT (large language models), and how they affect our brains.
Social Media and The Brain
Social media, the internet, and our phones are all things I’ve talked about at length before. See below:
In a nutshell:
It’s not just what you’re doing, it’s how you’re doing it:
Opening your phone/social media on autopilot without intentionality reinforces that behaviour as an easy habit (1).
It encourages your salience network to give importance to your phone.
It’s not just how long you’re on your phone, it’s what you’re consuming:
Content can exacerbate our anxiety, fuel comparisons, and perpetuate feelings of loneliness (2).
Short-form content discourages active thinking and gives us an easy dopamine ‘hit’. This means it feels good in the short-term, and it’s great at distracting us from feelings that are uncomfortable (3,4).
The overwhelming amount of options means even the presence of our smartphones can steal our attention (5).
Internet use changes brain structures involved in emotional regulation (6,7).
Phones Are Easier
Maybe something I haven’t mentioned previously though, is that it is absolutely easier to use your phone than pick up a book, at least to begin with. It just is. The dopamine hit is quicker. And physically it’s easier and faster than, for example, going for a run.
BUT! At the end of the book, or the run, your overall satisfaction will be higher. You’ll probably be thinking more clearly.
So, part of this is going to be rewiring the habit of picking up your phone. And I’m against the narrative of willpower to do this. You’re going to take the easiest path you can when your cognitive reserve is already low after a long day of work. So… Leave the phone in another room. Buy an old phone that doesn’t have social media on it to bring with you when you go out. Put a lock on social media apps. It will eventually get easier to wilfully pick the thing that isn’t the phone.
And the other part of this is going to be that mindset we have towards our phones versus a book, a run, etc. Alia Crum’s research focuses heavily on how mindset can impact our physiology. Think about what you want to tell yourself about the phone versus the book, and practise saying that.
Top Tips
If you’re feeling like you really need to use social media or the internet or your phone, especially because you’re trying to distract yourself from feelings or emotions, two quick and easy things to help yourself:
Take a 5-minute walk outside!
5-minute journaling
Both of these are helping with emotional regulation, and will help you process whatever’s going on, rather than ignoring it with your phone.
The Brain On ChatGPT
The new thing I’d like to talk about is ChatGPT. This is a type of artificial intelligence (AI), a large language model, which is essentially fancy technology that can generate ‘human-like’ responses to your questions by predicting the next likely word.
Because it is predicting the next likely word, it can be wrong, since the most likely word will not always be the correct word. Because it is predicting the next likely word, it is reductionist by nature. All the ‘unlikely words’ become less used. So, the more we use it, the more it can change language. Because it is trained on the whole internet, it can be wrong, depending on what’s on the internet. Because it is developed to ‘please’ you (which in the AI world is known as reinforcement learning – and you’ve probably seen this, when it asks you to pick which response you prefer), it may lie to you to please you.
And now we have research on LLMs coming out showing that it seems to be harming our critical thinking skills. This new study* (8) shows that using ChatGPT can cause ‘cognitive debt’ – basically not using our brain for a task, not encoding things in our brain, not actively thinking.
*This study is not yet peer-reviewed, so we need to take it lightly.
The study looked at three groups of students writing an essay: one used only their brains (Brain Only), one used search engines like google (Search Engine), and one used ChatGPT (LLM). While writing the essays, the students’ brain activity was being monitored with EEGs. And after completing the writing tasks, they were asked a variety of questions about what they wrote.
When students had to quote back a sentence from the essays they’d written, in the LLM-Assisted group, 83% of participants could not provide a correct quotation, whereas only 11.1 % of students in both the Search‑Engine and Brain‑Only groups encountered the same issue. Additionally, when asked which prompts they were given for their essay, only 33% of participants from the LLM-Assisted group recognized all three prompts. The brain does not seem to be encoding the task in memory when LLMs are used for assistance.
Looking at the EEGs, the Brain-Only group had stronger occipital-to-frontal information flow. Thinking about this in terms of the number of brain connections, the Brain-Only group had 79 connections and the LLM group had only 42. Looking at alpha activity, beta activity, delta activity, and theta brain activity, the LLM group had less activity in all compared to the Brain-Only groups.
Alpha band connectivity is associated with internal attention and creative semantic (word) processing, so not having LLMs to help encourages more internal generation.
Beta band connectivity is similar, with a focus on active cognitive processing and sensorimotor integration, which suggests that without AI, cognitive engagement was more sustained.
Delta band activity is more reflective of broad, large-scale cortical integration, and is more active at an exploratory stage of thinking rather than generation. This was therefore more encouraged when the LLM was not available.
Theta band activity is associated with working memory and executive control, which means the LLM group had more executive control available to evaluate the LLMs output, but it didn’t encourage memory integration.
Shocking? I know. I talk about it more on YouTube with Dr. Julie Fratantoni:
There’s no denying that LLMs, used in the right way, can increase productivity (9). They can help with editing written text and coding. They can also help even the playing field for non-English speakers or individuals who are not as confident when writing.
This isn’t very different from many things in life – we can do things actively or passively. I’m sure everyone has read a page of a book, realised they didn’t pay attention, and had to re-read it. If we want to engage our brains, make sure to do things actively. This is important for brain health and overall health, especially as we age.
Until Next Week,
Nicole x
P.S. Leave a comment below with requests for future newsletters!
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