Your Brain on ChatGpT - The Surprising and Unsurprising Findings - Episode 44
00:00:07 Jon Bergmann: Welcome to another episode of the Reach Every Student podcast. Today I want to talk about AI and your brain on ChatGPT. This summer, I was at an AI conference and news broke that MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology had just released a study. It's actually a pre release of their study your brain on ChatGPT the accumulation of cognitive debt. And so it had a lot to do with what's happening with AI and student brains. They did a limited study a lot of people this is very controversial study. They did a limited study. They got a number of people, college students in the Boston area. and they had them write essays and they broke them into three groups. They had the brain only group write the participants who only wrote essays using only their own cognitive abilities. That's group one. Group number two, I call the Google Group. They only had access to a search engine. They could use a standard search engine to research while they were writing. And then a third group, the LM group. The ChatGPT group. These are students who use ChatGPT to write their essays. They then had them write essays, and they hooked them up to what's called an EEG machine. It measures brain wave activity. And based on what scientists have learned for many, many years, they've learned about what it looks like when somebody learns, what have they learned? When they do certain things and they analyze brainwaves. They also did additional tests afterwards to ask them about, you know, what did they understand about what they wrote? ET cetera, et cetera. True. And the results were scary. Now hear this carefully if you were to talk to the participants. I've watched interviews on these guys. Who's saying these things? They are very much emphasizing this was just for essay writing. Can it be categorized across all uses of AI and and llms? And they say, no, but I'm a teacher and I, I think it their findings might actually be something that's important to look at. I want additional studies. I want studies with high school students. I want studies with college students. I want studies with not just essay writing, but lots of different aspects. But I like their their study protocol. I think it it looks quite sound. Anyways, here's what they found. You probably are not surprised. Those who only had access to their brain showed the greatest engagement. And they found that those students wrote the best essays. They asked questions afterwards. Those essays were better. Their brain was more activated and they understood things more. Actually, that doesn't mean that their essays were necessarily better. All right, so that was the winner. In second place was I'll call the Google Group. And down at the bottom was the ChatGPT group. So what this seems to be, I'm going to say it seems, seems to be indicating is that if you just have access to ChatGPT, what they're saying is you're offloading your cognitive load to the LLM and you are now they said, I watched this interview with the lead researcher on CNN and she said, please don't use the word stupid. I'm going to say it's going to stupefy them. Because those students, it diminishes their their ability to learn. Now they then did a follow up. So I think this is actually the most interesting thing about this study.
00:03:45 Jon Bergmann: Their follow up was they took some of the people who only wrote with their brains, and then they said, now you can add ChatGPT. You can now add a large learning model, the LLM ChatGPT. And guess what happened? That group won overall. So those who just had their brain the whole time were not showing as much cognitive increase as those who did brain. They kind of did like they had sessions brain, brain, brain. Then ChatGPT that was the winner. The loser was ChatGPT ChatGPT chatbot. Brain. So what they discovered is the order in which somebody uses AI at least a these llms is super important. And this has been a message that I've been telling my own students. If you read my open letter to my students about AI, I essentially say this, but now there is some preliminary data that's saying that this is important. Think about this. AI is here to stay. AI is something we need to teach our students how to use. But let's have them do the hard cognitive work alone first. Then add ChatGPT. I think this is such an important thing because if you do the opposite and they start with ChatGPT, they are. It's too easy to offload that information to the machine, let the machine do the work and then your brain doesn't grow, it doesn't fire its neurons. It doesn't have the brainwave patterns that that are important. Now remember, maybe you don't know this, but the way that you learn and become smarter, the way you become, you know, more aware, a better problem solver is as your neurons are firing, firing in your brain, it changes actually structures in your brain. So we need your brain to fire for you to learn. Again, I've said this before. This is the productive struggle of a learner. We need to allow our students to go through productive struggle, but we also want them to, like, amplify their work. And they can then add ChatGPT or whatever AI tool you want to use after the fact. And this has been a message that I've been sharing with my students and saying, use your brain first, then let's add AI. One example that I talked about in last week's podcast, and it really I again did it again with my students just today and yesterday is so I teach with the flipped classroom model. I'm one of the pioneers of the model, and my students watched a video last night on the Rock cycle. So it's a geology class and they learn stuff. And then when they came to class. This is just becoming such a rich time. I say fire up the AI tutor tool. So our school uses Flint K12. Great tool by the way. And I have fed this a here's the prompt. I say something like this. Ask um ask students to ask you a question about the topic of the rock cycle. Uh, please use this uploaded PDF as your training guide and answer their questions, and then take them deeper and have a conversation with them. And so I tell students, uh, open up the AI thing and then boom, they ask a question. They know they're going to be asked to ask a question, and then they dialogue deeper. One thing cool about the tool that I'm using is that then it it then, uh, summarizes what their conversation is live for me on my screen. And so I've got, you know, twenty kids in a class or whatever it might be. And then I can see what their question is. And I've limited this just to a five minute, uh, I think maybe six, whatever, five or six minutes. And then I'll say, hey, um, Sarah, that was an interesting question. Tell me more about what you learned. You were asking about this. And, you know, you know, Landon, you were asking this question about, um, how magma is different when it's above the Earth. Well, that wasn't the question I think he was asking. I'm thinking of a real student right now, and he was asking about how long it takes for a rock to form, or how long does it take for it to erode away and to turn into a sedimentary rock. And and he got interesting questions. And he's bringing now what he's learned from the AI tutor back to the class. But but again, go back to your brain on ChatGPT. What was the thing they did first? They struggled. They had productive struggle on their own. Then they brought in the AI tutor, and the AI tutor is coming afterwards. And I'm designing this so that they're forced to do this in this order. So anyways, it seems to be working and I really want to encourage you to think about that as you are instructing your students. If you're a student, if you're even just somebody who's out there using AI in your workforce, do the mental work yourself first and then add the AI to help you, because I, I worry that if we let AI do too much of the work, we'll lose our humanity and we will be stupefied. And I don't want you to be stupefied. I want you and your students especially, to become the leaders and to use these tools in ways that are going to help them individually to thrive in the world. Hey, thanks for listening to this quick podcast about AI and your brain on ChatGPT. This has been John Bergmann. Now go out and reach every student by.
