"Here's the irony at the heart of our artificial intelligence (AI) moment: The tool designed to think for us may be the very thing that forces us to think better. Yes, AI can make us lazy, atrophying certain skills as we outsource judgment to machines. Recent research (e.g., Kosmyna et al., 2025) suggests heavy AI use may weaken certain cognitive capacities."
"Every major technology has reduced our capacities in some areas while expanding them in others. 1 Writing obviated our need for memorization-some theories suggest oral cultures possessed near-photographic recall-but it allowed us to externalize cognition, to think by writing, and to make thinking collectively available, moreso with the printing press, and now digital media."
""Thinking is driven by the human need to know the truth-the reality of who one is and what is occurring in one's life." "It requires two minds to think a person's most disturbing thoughts." "The capacity for thinking is developed in order to come to terms with thoughts derived from one's disturbing emotional experience." "There is an inherent psychoanalytic function of the personality, and dreaming is the principal process through which that function is performed.""
AI use can atrophy certain cognitive skills when people outsource judgment to machines, but technological change has historically redistributed cognitive capacities rather than simply diminishing them. Writing reduced demands on memory while enabling externalized, collective thinking; the printing press and digital media further extended shared cognition. Thinking emerges as a capacity developed in response to overwhelming or raw thoughts that exceed current mental capacity. Psychological theory emphasizes that confronting disturbing emotional experiences and having others help process them cultivates a mature thinking function that integrates emotion and meaning.
Read at Psychology Today
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