Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The study design
The study followed 54 participants through four sessions over four months. They were split into three groups writing essays: one used ChatGPT, one used a traditional search engine, and one, the brain-only group, used no tools at all.
What the headsets showed
Researchers watched brain activity through headsets. The ChatGPT group showed severe deficits in memory and in a sense of owning their essays, and 83 percent could not quote from what they had just written. The search engine group landed somewhere in between.
Effort and memory
The pattern runs from most effort to least. Writers who composed essays unaided had the most to remember, search users had to gather and combine material, and ChatGPT users handed the work over. It matches the idea that a brain weakens when it skips the work, the way a body weakens without physical labor.
Why does writing yourself help memory?
Psychologists call it the generation effect. In a 1978 paper, Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf found that people remembered words they had produced themselves better than words they had only read. Producing material forces a person to retrieve and connect ideas, which strengthens the memory. Reading a finished text, or receiving one from a tool, skips that step.
How do headsets track brain activity?
These headsets use electroencephalography, or EEG, which places electrodes on the scalp to pick up the electrical signals produced by networks of neurons. EEG records changes within milliseconds, which makes it good at timing but poor at pinpointing which brain region is active. Researchers often compare signal strength across frequency bands and between regions to estimate how much different areas work together. Hans Berger recorded the first human EEG in 1924.
Does relying on tools change what we remember?
A 2011 study in Science by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel Wegner tested this with search engines. Participants who expected to be able to look information up later remembered the facts less well. They were better at remembering where the information could be found. The authors described the internet as a kind of external memory.
More from All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
