Letting a tool do the thinking so you do not have to: the calculator, the satnav, the search engine, and now the model that writes the email. Psychologists named it in 2016, having studied it for years under the 'Google effect'. In 2025 it became a worry with a headline, when an MIT study wired essay-writers to EEGs and found the ChatGPT group remembered least of what they had written.
The 2011 Google effect result, that people remember where to find information rather than the information, has been partially replicated and partially not. The 2025 findings are small and early. The record files cognitive offloading as a real phenomenon with an overclaimed evidence base.
Sighted in June 2025 as a preprint with fifty-four participants and two hundred pages that was reported as proof that ChatGPT rots the brain. The authors put a note on the paper asking journalists to stop saying that. The record notes that the note was itself widely shared, unread.
The record's note: offloading is not new and not bad. Writing is offloading; so is a diary. The question the 2025 studies raised is whether offloading the composition itself, not just the storage, leaves anything behind. The MIT paper's phrase for the residue was 'cognitive debt'.
I remember not knowing a single phone number after 2005, and my father knowing forty. In 2025 I noticed I could not write a difficult paragraph without asking for a first draft. I am filing this under the heading rather than fighting it. The record is, after all, a way of not remembering.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
