Cognitive Atrophy 2025

Quick—get out a pencil and paper, and tell me what 21,272,032 divided by 4 is?

Juuuuuust kidding. You probably haven’t done long division in a long time, so you’re probably pretty rusty on how the digits carry over. At some point—probably during high school—you were told that you could use a calculator from now on.

Dividing and multiplying were now considered trivial, meaning it was assumed that of course you could do this math, but why waste all that precious brain-energy and time? Instead, the calculator could take care of the light work for you (although some of the more trivial work can be every bit as mentally taxing!).

Except: really, try a long division problem some time. It’s really tough to remember how to do it, and you might surprise yourself with how little you remember, assuming you’re not a math teacher or someone who uses pen and paper to do calculations regularly.

This is something you’re probably already familiar with, and it’s not some new argument, either. Here’s me describing Plato, and his own description of cognitive atrophy:

He was upset that writing meant that the ancient skill of memorizing long passages would go away. Plato feared that we might be trading in convenience for the ability to reason. Here’s a 2400 year old bit of wisdom to consider:

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom."

This is a powerful admonition and an excellent point I’ve made more than once here, but the trade-offs are probably worth it to most folks. Being able to read means you can effectively remember things much more precisely, and across multiple generations. That’s an enormous upside.

At least kids still know how to use calculators, you’re thinking.

Interesting you should think that. When is the last time you personally got a calculator out? It’s the same for kids. They use their phones nowadays instead, and they don’t even have to use a calculator app any more: they can literally just ask an AI for the answer.

Headlines everywhere are about whether AI is going to replace virtually all human work, and that’s for good reason! This is roughly akin to the industrial revolution, when steam began to power machines in the physical world—only this time, we’re using energy to power thinking and reasoning.

Also: this revolution is happening in the blink of an eye. Nobody has any time to adjust to changes that would normally take a generation for us to get used to some new way of life. Instead, we get a few short years, and soon that could be measured in months.

Amid all the headline panic over job loss, there’s virtually nothing being written about cognitive atrophy. We are simultaneously becoming vastly smarter, while also becoming way dumber.

This is not me suggesting anyone become anti-technology!

The truth is that every single idea we’ve kept and then passed down from one generation to the next—all of those ideas are a form of technology. Every beneficial idea that paved the way for even better ideas represented a stepping stone along our technological pathway.

No, I’m talking more about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater here.

What’s the baby, and what’s the bathwater? I can’t possibly answer that for you, but I do want to encourage you to ask yourself the question.

Every time you adopt new technology that makes a process your brain normally does much easier, there is a trade-off in your overall abilities. Now, you can no longer do the thing you did so well—or maybe you never learn how to do it in the first place, as is the case with kids today never learning cursive handwriting.

Will kids soon never learn how to write by hand? Are we about to enter a purely digital, online world for writing? I’m not sure, but we certainly seem to have done this with paper maps.

If I’m in the middle of a voice conversation with an AI, I find myself doing a great deal of cognitive offloading—having the AI remember things from earlier in the conversation so that I can think about the next things to discuss, then revisit them later. This is like leaving tabs open on your browser for further study later, or maybe like jotting a note down for tomorrow.

I’m effectively trading in my short-term memory skill for greater ability to reason, the very thing Plato railed against with regard to the invention of writing.

Clearly, if I’m okay with offloading my short-term memory, I’m fine with my smartphone doing long division for me, but you’ve got to decide where you draw your own cyborg line.