There's a study from MIT that found 83% of people who used ChatGPT to write an essay couldn't quote a single sentence from what they'd written. That stopped me cold.

Richard Lalchan is back, and this time we went deep on critical thinking. Not as an abstract virtue, but as something that can be measured, exercised, and apparently lost. Richard is a digital wellbeing and clarity coach, and someone who thinks harder about our relationship with technology than almost anyone I know.

We started where a lot of these conversations start: with Daniel Kahneman. System one, system two. The fast brain and the slow brain. The point isn't that one is better than the other. You need system one when someone shouts fire. But social media, phone design, and now AI are all pulling us toward the fast brain, toward the dopamine hit, away from the kind of thinking that actually serves us.

Then Richard walked me through that MIT study. Fifty-four participants, split into three groups: one using ChatGPT, one using Google Search, one using just their brain. Over four months, the ChatGPT group showed significantly reduced cognitive engagement compared to the others. And when they switched them around in the final session, the effect persisted. The conclusion the researchers used was striking: LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels. The phrase that stayed with me came from the study's concept of cognitive debt. Choosing the speed of AI today is borrowing intelligence from the future. At some point, the debt comes due.

Richard came with guardrails, not lectures. Nine of them. Don't anthropomorphise your tech. Own the first draft. Engage your system two before you hit submit. Do a renewal of the mind audit. Go for a walk without headphones and bring an unsolved problem instead. These aren't anti-AI positions. Richard uses AI every day. They're ways of staying the author of your own thinking rather than outsourcing it quietly, habit by habit, prompt by prompt.

We ended in territory I hadn't expected: people who have formed genuine emotional attachments to AI companions, including some who wanted to save a version of ChatGPT they considered a life partner. Richard didn't dismiss them. He talked about individual circumstances, about what leads someone to that point, about the fact that no one is beyond help. That felt like the right note. Curiosity over judgement. Understanding before prescription.

The takeaway I keep turning over: critical thinking doesn't maintain itself. It has to be chosen, practised, and protected. In a world designed to shortcut it at every turn, that takes intention. It always has. It just matters more now.

Richard's guardrails will be available at renewyourmind.net. Go and find him there.

This was made with humans.

Your host - Shaun Phillips

Editor: Glen Boswell
https://astralforgefilm.com
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