How to Learn With AI Without Quietly Rotting Your Brain

I've taught over 500 students, and in the last two years I've watched a brand-new failure mode appear that didn't exist before. It's not laziness. It's the opposite — it looks like *progress*. A student shows up to our session and they're flying. Solving problems, finishing exercises, "getting it." Then I close the laptop, hand them a blank sheet of paper, and ask them to do one of those problems alone. And they freeze. Not because they're not smart. Because the part of their brain that was supposed to be doing the work was quietly outsourced to a chatbot, and nobody told them. This is the single most important thing I can teach you about learning in 2026. So let's talk about it honestly. ## The study that should scare you a little In 2025, researchers (Bastani et al.) ran a field experiment with nearly 1,000 high school maths students in Turkey, published in *PNAS*. They split the students into three groups: some got a plain GPT-4 chat interface to help them practice, some got a safeguarded "tutor" version designed to give hints instead of answers, and some got only their notes. The group with the plain GPT-4 crushed the practice round — about **48% better** scores. Looked like a miracle. Then came the real exam. No AI. No notes. Just them and the problem. And the students who'd practiced with that plain GPT-4 scored **17% worse** than the kids who only ever had their notes. (The safeguarded "hints-only" group didn't take that hit — which is the whole point of what follows.) Read that again. Practicing with AI made them *feel* better and *perform* worse when it counted. The researchers had a clean name for what happened: the AI didn't teach them, it *did the problems for them*, and the brain — efficient lazy organ that it is — happily skipped the rep. That's the trap. And here's the cruel part: it's invisible while it's happening. You feel like a genius right up until the moment you need to actually be one. ## Why your brain does this (and why it's not your fault) Learning is physical. When you struggle with a problem — that uncomfortable, slightly-sweaty "I don't get it yet" feeling — your brain is literally building and strengthening connections. Researchers call the easy version "cognitive offloading": handing the thinking to an external tool. And studies in 2025 found offloading was *worst* in younger learners, the ones who leaned hardest on the AI and practiced critical thinking the least. Think of it like the gym. Imagine you hire someone to lift the weights *for* you. You'd watch beautiful reps, feel productive, and walk out with the exact same arms you came in with. AI used wrong is a spotter who quietly grabs the bar and does every single lift while you stand there nodding. The struggle isn't the obstacle to learning. The struggle **is** the learning. AI's superpower — removing friction — is the exact thing that can quietly remove your growth. ## The fix: make AI your tutor, not your ghostwriter I'm not anti-AI. I use it every day. The students of mine who are pulling ahead right now are the ones using it *more* than everyone else — just differently. The difference is one rule: **AI should make you think harder, never less.** Here's how that looks in practice. ### 1. Always attempt first. Always. Before you ask the AI anything, write *your* answer down — even a bad one, even a guess. There's a beautiful, well-established learning principle here: attempting to retrieve an answer *before* you're shown it — the "pretesting" or "test-enhanced learning" effect — makes you retain far more. The act of trying first primes your brain to actually absorb the answer instead of letting it slide off. No attempt, no learning. Make this non-negotiable. ### 2. Ask "why," not "what." Bad prompt: *"Write me a function that reverses a linked list."* Good prompt: *"I tried reversing a linked list and got an infinite loop — here's my code. Don't fix it. Ask me three questions that would help me find the bug myself."* Make the AI Socratic. Tell it explicitly: *"Act as a tutor. Do not give me the answer. Give me hints, and let me struggle."* Most people never type that sentence. It changes everything. ### 3. The closed-laptop test. After any AI-assisted session, close everything and redo one problem from scratch. If you can't, you didn't learn it — you watched it. This is the single best lie-detector for your own progress. I make every student do it. It stings the first few times. That sting is the sound of an illusion breaking, which is exactly what you want *before* the interview, not during it. ### 4. Make AI explain, then you re-explain to it. After it explains a concept, type it back in your own words and ask "Is this right? What did I miss?" This is the Feynman technique with a tireless partner. If you can't explain it simply, you don't own it yet. ### 5. Use AI for the parts that aren't the point. Here's the nuance, because I don't want you to swing into anti-AI extremism either. Not everything is a rep worth doing by hand. If you're learning data analysis and you've already written fifty `for` loops, you don't need to handcraft the fifty-first to prove anything — let AI scaffold the boring boilerplate so you can spend your scarce brain-energy on the actual concept you're trying to learn. The skill is knowing the difference. Ask yourself one question before you let AI do a thing: *"Is this the part I'm trying to learn, or just plumbing in the way?"* If it's the thing you're learning, do it yourself — that's the rep. If it's plumbing, automate it and move on. People who never ask this question either offload everything (and learn nothing) or offload nothing (and move at a crawl). The winners route deliberately. ## The new superpower nobody's naming Here's the thing I genuinely believe, and it's good news. The people who learn the *fundamentals* deeply — while everyone else outsources them — are about to be disproportionately valuable. When juniors can prompt an AI to write a sorting algorithm but can't tell you *why* it's slow, the rare person who actually understands the "why" becomes the one who gets hired, promoted, and trusted. AI didn't make fundamentals obsolete. It made them *scarce*. And scarce is valuable. So use the tool. Use it aggressively. Just make sure that at the end of every session, the thing that got stronger is *you* — not your transcript. If you want a real human in the loop — someone to hand you the blank sheet of paper, watch you struggle in the good way, and catch the gaps an AI will happily paper over — that's literally what I do 1:1. Come learn the way that actually sticks → **/book-session**. You don't need to fear AI. You need to out-think it. Let's make sure the brain doing the thinking is yours.