What the Studies Say About How AI Affects Your Brain: A (Very Big) Compilation

The entire literature provides a single clear, surprising, and nuanced finding

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INTRODUCTION

Between 2023 and 2026 — that is, between ChatGPT changed the world forever and today — many studies from institutions including MIT, Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oxford, Google DeepMind, and Chinese universities have investigated what AI chatbots do to human cognition, learning, and psychology.

These studies include brain scans, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with thousands of participants, longitudinal surveys, meta-analyses, and field experiments in real classrooms and workplaces (both preprints and peer-reviewed).

But, to the best of my knowledge, no one has compiled them in one easily-readable and easily-accessible place. This is it.

Individual studies get covered as isolated news stories — alarming headline, one-day cycle, and then forgotten — and the result is that everyone has a vague uneasiness, a sense that AI might be bad for thinking, but nobody has the full picture.

Here’s the full picture as we have it so far.