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Using AI for writing costs more than you think. Research shows five things you lose when a chatbot does the thinking for you.
London cab drivers have bigger brains than you do. Well, part of their brains, anyway.
In 2000, a neuroscientist named Eleanor Maguire scanned the brains of 16 licensed London cabbies. To earn their licences, these drivers must master “the Knowledge,” a mental map of thousands of streets that takes years to learn. Maguire found that the rear part of their hippocampus, a region tied to spatial memory, was larger than in people who didn’t drive taxis. The longer they’d been driving, the bigger it was.
Meanwhile, the rest of us let our phones tell us where to turn, and some of us can now get lost on the way to a favourite restaurant.
I mention this because the brain grows the parts we use and lets the rest go to seed. Plenty of us have stopped using the part that writes.
This summer, the New York Times ran a piece on students who hand their essays over to AI, and the quoted experts kept returning to the idea that writing is a technology for thinking. Students aren’t the only ones tempted. If you write anything — journal articles, book chapters, grant applications, blog posts, or journal entries — you’ve felt the pull too.
So, what do we lose when we stop writing for ourselves? The research points to five things.
1-Your memory of what you said
In 2025, researchers at the MIT Media Lab had 54 university students write essays while wearing EEG caps that measured their brain activity. Some wrote with ChatGPT, while the rest used either a search engine or nothing but their own heads.
The ChatGPT group showed the weakest brain connectivity of anyone in the study. Worse, after the first session, 83 per cent of them couldn’t correctly quote a single sentence from the essay they had finished minutes before.
That’s the memory of a golden retriever who has just spotted a squirrel. If you’re an academic, picture yourself fielding questions after a conference talk about a paper you can’t recall, and you’ll see why the Q&A will feel like the longest 20 minutes of your life.
2-The sense that the work is yours
The ChatGPT users also felt the least ownership of their essays, while the brain-only group felt it more strongly than anyone.
That sense of ownership does real work. We fight for writing we own, and we keep making it better. When a client pushes back on your draft, you need to know why you made each choice, and “the software liked it” won’t win you the next contract.
It’s like getting a compliment on a cake you bought at Costco. You say thank you, but you don’t feel a thing because you know the credit belongs to someone in a hairnet at the warehouse.
3-The struggle (which you need)
UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork coined the term “desirable difficulties” for learning that feels hard and sticks better because of it. Writing is hard for one reason above all. Every sentence forces you to decide what you think, and you can’t fake that decision for long because the page shows you every gap in your reasoning the moment you try to explain an idea you only thought you understood.
Hand over that struggle to a machine and you skip the learning along with the pain. Using AI this way is like hiring a personal trainer who offers to lift the weights for you.
4-Your weirdness
AI tools work by predicting the likeliest next word. That’s fine for a weather report, but likely death for a memoir.
The things that make your writing worth reading are the unlikely ones: the odd anecdote, the phrase your grandmother used, the comparison nobody else would think to make, the opinion that will annoy your department chair. A chatbot doesn’t know any of this stuff and will simply produce something smooth and sensible.
Beige may suit your living-room walls. But not your writing.
5-The skill to judge the machine
My favourite finding from the MIT study came in its fourth session, when the researchers switched the roles facing participants. The students who had relied on ChatGPT now had to write on their own, and their brains showed signs of under-engagement. The students who had written unaided now got ChatGPT, and they showed better memory recall and more brain activity than the long-time users.
The tool helped people who had already done the thinking, but it did far less for people still building the skill.
You can’t edit what you couldn’t have written, and you won’t spot a bad paragraph if you’ve forgotten what a good one feels like.
How to keep what you have
You don’t have to swear off AI. In fact, I use it regularly for editing, for tech help and for brainstorming. But I want to protect the part of my work that builds my brain.
Write every day, even if it’s only for five to 15 minutes. Your first draft should come from your own head, crappy as it may be. Then, if you want help, invite AI to the editing stage once the thinking is done and the sentences are yours.
Those London cabbies didn’t grow their brains by sitting in the back seat. Take the wheel. Fifteen minutes a day is plenty.
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