About five years ago, at the height of the pandemic, I talked with neuroscientist David Rock about how leaders could use neuroscience to be more effective in that context.
His advice boiled down to the idea of emphasizing positive feedback, because our brains are wired to track status and react to threats.
This was a bit ironic because Rock is a very dynamic speaker and an intense guy.
His name is literally “Rock,” which doesn’t make for the most calming experience, and at the risk of sounding like the America-centric person I am, he’s Australian, and Australian accents always sound a bit extra excited to me.
In spite of that, or maybe because of that, it stuck with me.
Fast forward to today, and Rock has written something new about the biggest challenge most of us face in the age of AI—more specifically, what happens to the human brain when people let AI stand in for them in meetings, write their emails, or handle tasks they used to do themselves.
In short, he’s worried that people are offloading so much of their thinking that they’re losing essential piece of how humans actually learn, remember, and generate insights.
Example: Rock describes attending a virtual session at which he expected 12 people, but only 6 humans showed up. The other half sent AI agents instead–bots that joined the call, took notes, and emailed summaries to their human counterparts later.
I feel like this would be obvious, but conversations among those who did participate felt flat and empty when AI agents attended—probably more so than if the six humans had attended alone, without these little robots sitting in.
From a neuroscience perspective, Rock explains that when people focus on ideas in the presence of others, even virtually, their brains encode information more deeply. Our brains have evolved to consider social signals as context—who’s speaking, how others respond, and what that might mean for our own group standing.
So, being there, with other people, activates more of your brain than reading a summary ever could.
There’s another piece to this that Rock calls “spreading activation.”
When you think about an idea silently, certain neural circuits activate in your brain.
But when you speak about that same idea to another person, you activate different circuits—actually, many more circuits—across other parts of your brain.
This activation triggers thoughts or ideas about other concepts, enabling us to find implications and applications for ideas more easily, consider multiple angles, recognize patterns, and integrate new information with existing knowledge.
But, when AI provides instant answers without space for discussion, your thoughts stay surface-level and more one-dimensional.
A recent MIT study that Rock references drives this home. Researchers tracked 54 people writing essays over four months. Some used ChatGPT, some used search engines, some used only their brains.
Eighty-three percent of individuals who used generative AI to help them write an essay struggled to remember the content of their work.
Among those who were allowed to use another type of search engine or no tool at all, only 11 percent struggled to remember.
I suspect I’m preaching to the choir when I warn of the dangers of AI, but I’m not totally anti-AI. Heck, there already are significant productivity gaps between those who use AI well and those who don’t use it at all.
But I’m all for asking hard and insistent questions about what the heck we’re doing to ourselves as our society embraces it so quickly and thoroughly.
Even better maybe, if you can do it with an intense Australian accent.
Quick poll, totally apropos of nothing, because I am interested—and because as you may know since you read this newsletter, after scaling back on Substack I’ve basically gone back all-in. I’m curious whether the Substack app has changed the experience for people here.
7 other things
Australians desperately seeking comfort after the slaying of 15 people as they celebrated their Jewish faith have embraced the story of Ahmed al Ahmed, the Syrian-Australian Muslim shop owner who put an end to the rampage of one of the shooters. A fundraising page has attracted donations by some 40,000 people, who gave 2.3 million Australian dollars ($1.5 million) so far. (Yahoo News)
Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, ordered his navy to escort ships carrying petroleum products from port, risking a confrontation with the United States on the high seas as he defied President Trump’s declaration of a “blockade” aimed at the country’s oil industry. (NYT)
President Trump delivered a televised speech Wednesday evening focusing heavily on the economy, and said he was sending checks of $1,776 to all U.S. service members as a “warrior dividend.” Trump did not mention Venezuela. A Washington Post average of national polls so far in December found that 39 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, compared to 57 percent who disapprove. (WashPost; The Hill)
Verizon refused to unlock a man’s iPhone so it could be used with another cellular service. He sued the carrier and won. (Ars Technica)
Four politically vulnerable House Republicans rebelled on Wednesday against their party’s refusal to address Affordable Care Act subsidies slated to expire, setting up a bruising election-year battle over health care. The House passed a narrow G.O.P. health care bill that would allow the subsidies to expire, a result projected to send premiums soaring for millions of Americans, but the renegade Republican’s actions alongside Democrats will force an early January vote on reviving the subsidies. (NYT)
A hacking group called “ShinyHunters” says it has obtained stolen data belonging to premium customers of the leading sex website Pornhub and is threatening to publish it. Although Reuters could not immediately establish the scope, scale, or details of the breach, the hackers provided a sample of the data which the news agency was able to partially authenticate. “We’re demanding a ransom payment in Bitcoin,” ShinyHunters told Reuters in an online chat. (Reuters)
Gil Gerard, the actor from Arkansas best known for his turn as the wisecracking hero of the 1979-81 NBC series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, died Tuesday. He was 82. Gerard lived in Georgia and died after a battle with “a rare and viciously aggressive form of cancer,” his wife, Janet, announced in a Facebook post. (Hollywood Reporter)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
Thoughts on A/i? Why? It never thinks about me.
I disagree. I write. I publish. I use AI as it’s intended. It is a tool, not a stand in, and I remember what I write.
We didn’t lose our minds when we moved from manual Royal typewriters to word processors, then computers, and we won’t lose them now. Tools change how we work, not whether we think.
Used actively, AI sharpens thinking. Used passively, it dulls it. That distinction has always mattered and always will.
The real issue isn’t AI, it’s ownership.