Last summer, I spent four days using AI to research a chapter on cognitive overload.
I would write 10 words, and get back 1,000 words of cited research, then dive into the papers to read more, then ask five more questions. After four days, I had read more than 100,000 words of AI-generated text. But I had only written 1,000 words of my own. That's a 100:1 ratio. Not very healthy.
And buried in all the AI text were countless nuggets I wanted to capture, but I was moving so fast I just tried to hold it all in my head. You can probably guess what happened next...
In my effort to understand the term cognitive overload, I overloaded my own mind.
Cognitive overload happens to many of us at different times. But AI adds new flavors of it.
Have you experienced any of these three cognitive traps of using AI?
Cognitive Debt
AI can give you so many interesting findings and avenues to explore.
But you just have mountains more to process. If you keep adding more inputs, the mountain just gets taller, and you get AI-driven cognitive debt: where unprocessed inputs stack up against your mind until it has to declare bankruptcy.
It makes it so your mind can’t function. It means abandoning your research, giving up, and feeling horrible about yourself.
Cognitive Isolation
When you feel bad about leaving your work, it’s easy to withdraw from others, which leads to a situation of AI-driven cognitive isolation: the quiet replacement of human thinking partners with AI.
Unfortunately, this aspect of AI dependence isn’t an episode of Black Mirror, it’s something that is easy for any of us to mildly fall into. You might think you’re “keeping the human in the loop,” but if you don’t have other humans to engage with in some form, it’s not healthy.
We need the human. And the human-to-human. Without that, all we have is an always available, never inconvenient, and far too agreeable AI to coddle us. We need the challenge, surprise, and fun that comes from thinking with other people.
Cognitive Surrender
Work with AI long enough, and it’s easy to get lulled into AI-driven cognitive surrender: where humans abandon independent, logical reasoning and blindly accept AI-generated answers, even when incorrect.
Cognitive surrender involves trusting AI (system 3) over human intuition (system 1) and analysis (system 2), resulting in lower cognitive effort but higher confidence in wrong answers. It's when AI is thinking for you. When slowly, you’ve abdicated your most valuable resource: your thoughts. That’s a dangerous place to be.
These cognitive traps of AI are not a binary ON/OFF switch.
It’s scarier than that. They creep.
AI cognitive traps are a dimmer switch, where your lights are slowly being turned off.
- Consuming more than you’re processing? You’ll accumulate cognitive debt.
- Working solo with AI all day? You’ll be more susceptible to cognitive isolation.
- Had a long, tiring day? You’ll be more susceptible to cognitive surrender.
I've fallen into each one. To various degrees. There's no shame in it. I've also built up an immunity and found the antidote. And here is the good news:
There are solutions to each of these cognitive traps.
That’s what I’ll cover in my mini-email series on AI.
But you have to opt-in right here to get it