You practice cognitive offloading all the time, whether you realize it or not. Lately I’ve been digging into the research on cognitive offloading—delegating a mental task to your surroundings so it takes up less bandwidth. (Call me old fashioned, but I’m still reading this research the analog way. I’d rather process it deeply myself than get some AI summary of it.)
You offload cognition to the physical world when you:
- count on your fingers;
- leave something on the stairs so you remember to take it up;
- wrap a rubber band around your wrist so you remember to take out the trash.
With these actions, we use the physical world as “memory.”
Of course, we also use the digital world as memory, like when we:
- use a calculator;
- store and organize documents on our computer;
- add a task to a to-do list (called “intention offloading”);
- use a calendar app.
Imagine keeping all your calendar events in your head. You’d be just like all the Facebook Marketplace no-shows we had last week.
These days, we’re not just offloading memory or tasks—we’re offloading cognition itself. The research on offloading thinking to AI is young, but it’s arriving—and the older research on offloading memory already tells us what the costs will be.
Cognitive offloading has three costs.
- It makes us remember less. Using GPS, we remember the route less—including even the landmarks along the way. Photograph something and you remember it less (remember this at your next concert, or the next time a friend’s concert videos show up on Instagram). Unless you zoom in: in the same study, people who zoomed in on a detail remembered the whole object. As I write in Hyperfocus, it is attention that does the remembering.
- Cognitive offloading can make us overconfident. One line of experiments found that “individuals who had recently used Google to help them complete a quiz reported higher levels of cognitive self-esteem” and another found that simply searching for a topic online leads us to believe we have more knowledge “in-the-head” about other topics. We see the world’s intelligence as our own.
- Cognitive offloading can create a negative feedback loop. The same studies show that the more we hand wayfinding to the GPS, the less of the route we build in memory—and the more we need to rely on GPS going forward.
With AI, the thing we offload is the thinking. Handy—and costly. You can uplevel from knowledge work to guidance work.
The key is to work more deliberately with AI, as David and I chat about all the time on Intentional AI.
Know that when you use AI, you’ll remember less and feel more confident—about what you remember and what you can do.
Outsourcing cognition is a slippery slope. You’ll feel smart doing it, especially while using a shiny frontier model. But mind that overconfidence, lest your mind turn to flab.
