Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

The MIT Media Lab study shows that when people write with ChatGPT their brain activity drops dramatically compared to unaided writing or even Google search. EEG measurements recorded weaker neural signatures in problem-solving regions, and recall of their own text fell below 20 percent. The effect persisted after participants switched back to tool-free writing, a phenomenon the researchers call cognitive debt.

The article frames this shift as a cultural echo of the 1960s, when Timothy Leary urged students to "turn on, tune in, drop out" as a rebellion against rote education. Today the "psychedelic" is a prompt, and the rebellion is a loss of mental ownership as AI does the heavy lifting of reasoning and composition.

For technical leaders the stakes are concrete: junior engineers and new hires risk building careers on outsourced thought, lacking the instinct to diagnose, debug, or question a model's output. The erosion of neural engagement translates to weaker problem-solving muscles, making teams more dependent on autocomplete and less able to handle edge cases or novel challenges.

The proposed remedy is to re-inject friction into learning. Leaders should design work that values the process, not just the output, and create moments where engineers must grapple with uncertainty, iterate without AI assistance, and own the reasoning behind decisions. By preserving the cognitive core, organizations keep their talent adaptable as AI capabilities evolve.