Reclaim your brain: How to use AI without losing memory, focus and thinking skills
https://www.straitstimes.com/life/reclaim-your-brain-how-to-use-ai-without-losing-memory-focus-and-thinking-skills
SINGAPORE – Tan Wan Ting, 34, founder of a digital marketing agency, is such a fan of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) that she has three accounts with Claude, an AI chatbot.
Since March, AI has helped her automate many work processes and boosted productivity among her team of almost 30. Excited about its potential, she would lie awake at night thinking of what to automate next.
In the process, however, it distorted the standards she had set for herself and her team. She started comparing humans to a machine that never gets tired or has a bad day.
“It’s an impossible bar. Holding my team and myself to it slowly eroded my patience and my sense of what a reasonable amount of output is,” she says.
Tan also realised that she became dependent on AI to process information, including simple materials, before she attempted to digest it herself. For instance, she would feed everything through AI to read first and summarise.
“I even started getting AI to crawl through e-books I’d bought and generate summaries rather than re-reading them myself,” she says, on how her habit of revisiting texts has changed.
“I realised that this shortcut was taking away my ability to sit with information and think it through.”
Her experience is probably becoming more commonplace as Singaporeans embrace a nationwide push for AI in the work sphere and beyond.
But what is the price for doubling or tripling performance?
Gen AI is such a new phenomenon that there is little data on its long-term effects on the brain. After all, the public version of ChatGPT launched only in November 2022.
Zhao Yi Jing, a neurologist in private practice at Mount Elizabeth Hospital, says early data in 2025 showed that university students with high AI usage were less engaged in independent problem-solving, and the younger ones demonstrated greater dependence and lower critical-thinking scores.
These studies include one published in The New England Journal Of Medicine by American researchers and one by Wuhan University in China.
Whether relying too much on AI leads to permanent brain atrophy is still unknown, Zhao adds.
Some may argue that using an AI chatbot is no different from using a search engine or using a vehicle Global Positioning System for navigation as these tools have enhanced, rather than eroded, human performance.
But neurologists say this analogy does not hold.
Such technological tools replace specific cognitive tasks since one still needs to choose from different routes or process search findings to form one’s own conclusion, says Jennifer Hung, a consultant in the Division of Neurology within the National University Hospital’s Department of Medicine.
“AI can substitute multiple higher-order executive functions simultaneously. It doesn’t just find information. It analyses it, structures arguments, writes the text and delivers a completed opinion,” Hung says.
“Older technologies automated the mechanics of a task, but AI automates the synthesis. When you bypass synthesis, you bypass the neuroplastic exercises that build human expertise.”
Risks of cognitive offloading
People who rely heavily on AI can experience cognitive offloading, which is the habit of relying on external tools to perform mental tasks that the brain would otherwise perform, Hung explains.
Frequent cognitive offloading can gradually affect one’s working memory, critical reasoning, attention, information retrieval and problem-solving, she adds. Subtle shifts, such as struggling to read a long article or forgetting details easily, can manifest in as little as a few weeks.
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“Take memory, for example. Retaining information requires working memory, encoding and retrieval. When you expect an AI to always hold or retrieve information for you, your brain skips the encoding phase entirely, a phenomenon known as digital amnesia,” she says.
At the same time, the seemingly polished output by AI chatbots can make users think the chatbots understand a topic better than they actually do. This erodes skills like critical thinking and error-checking.
Over time, users may learn to accept inaccurate information without question, Hung points out.
While anyone using AI frequently can experience cognitive offloading, two age groups seem particularly vulnerable to its effects, Hung says.
The first is children and teenagers, whose prefrontal cortex is still developing and will not mature until they are in their mid-20s. They may never fully develop the fundamental neural networks they need for logical reasoning, working memory and critical analysis if they use only AI for cognitive tasks.
Older adults, on the other hand, risk losing the mental stimulation they need to prevent age-related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s when they over-rely on AI.
“The key takeaway is to use AI to support your thinking and not replace it, so you continue to actively challenge your brain,” adds Zhao.
Use AI actively, not passively
AI does not have to drain the brain, though. The good news is that people with healthy brains can reverse short-term cognitive offloading.
Hung says: “If you reintroduce activities that demand active thinking, these neural pathways will rebuild and strengthen again because of neuroplasticity.”
She suggests the following strategies:
• Follow a brain-first approach: Brainstorm and draft your plan, paper or speech by yourself and bring in AI at the 70 per cent mark for feedback.
• Get AI to challenge you: Use prompts that stimulate thinking, such as “What assumptions am I making?” or “Give me the opposite argument”.
• Make AI the teacher: If you are trying to learn, prompt AI to quiz you instead of giving the answer straight away.
• Savour before you summarise: Read long-form material to cultivate attention skills.
• Block devices regularly: Carve out AI-free periods when you can write, plan or tackle problems.
• Question perfect answers: Do not take AI-generated replies at face value. Verify them, especially when it comes to topics like health, finances and legal issues.
• Keep your brain healthy: Exercise regularly, get enough sleep, engage with others socially and pick up new skills or cognitively demanding hobbies.
Tan says her recent epiphany about AI’s repercussions has led her to rethink how she uses it. Instead of letting it set the pace and cramming more into her day, she aims to use the time saved for face-to-face interaction.
“I’ve also started setting aside device-free time slots to properly reason through the important decisions and information I need to work through as a business owner. It’s a small change, but it forces me to do the thinking myself again instead of outsourcing it by default,” she says.
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