Are AI chatbots making us lose control of our brains?

Attention spans are in freefall. Psychologist Gloria Mark found that average attention spans dropped from two and a half minutes in 2003 to just 47 seconds by 2020—and the constant switching is directly linked to rising stress levels. AI may be making our brains lazy. When we outsource writing, summarizing, and evaluating to tools like ChatGPT, we skip the "depth of processing" that helps us actually learn and think critically—and those cognitive muscles can atrophy from disuse. Even our emotional intelligence is at risk. AI companions require none of the effort that real relationships demand, and Mark warns that if current trends continue, loneliness, purposelessness, and emotional decline will only deepen. The fix is effort, not abstinence. Mark isn't calling for a tech ban—she's calling for intentionality: read the book, skip the GPS, meet friends in person. The harder the task, she says, the greater the reward. " data-chronoton-post-id="1138427" data-chronoton-expand-collapse="1" data-chronoton-analytics-enabled="1"> This week I’ve been at SXSW London . There’s been music, film, and a lot—and I mean a lot —of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies. Early in her career, the biggest concerns were the potential impacts of internet and email use on our brains. We may laugh those concerns off today, but it’s true that as the technologies became more ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans began to shrink. Mark is worried that things are only getting worse. The title of our session was “Have we lost control of our brains?” Unfortunately, Mark told me, the answer is yes. Around two decades ago, Mark started wondering about how our use of devices might affect our attention spans. She set up what she calls “living laboratories,” using sensors and trackers to monitor adult volunteers’ attention, mood, and behavior when they were using devices. In 2003, she found that the average user had an attention span of around two and a half minutes. That’s how long people could spend focused on one thing before moving on to something else. “That surprised me at the time,” she told me during our session on Wednesday . “I thought: Wow, this is really short. ” But when she repeated the experiment in 2012, she found that attention spans had shrunk—all the way down to around 75 seconds on average, she said. In research she conducted between 2014 and 2020, attention spans shrank further still—to a mere 47 seconds, on average. Yikes. And it’s not good for us. Mark told me that she’s found switching our attention so frequently is stressful. “We would have people wear heart rate monitors, and … we would see direct correlation between switching attention fast and stress going up,” she told me. All this distraction makes it harder for us to get stuff done, too. “It just takes longer to do any single task if you’re switching your attention,” she told me. “It’s not great for performance. It’s not great for our emotional well-being.” And that’s for adults. What about the effects of digital technologies on children? A few months ago, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Google’s YouTube were ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to a 20-year-old woman who had accused the companies of creating products that led her to develop a childhood addiction. Just a couple of weeks ago, Meta settled another lawsuit , this one brought by a rural school district in Kentucky. The district had also accused the company of designing addictive products that were harmful to students and had sought more than $60 million to cover the costs of their mental-health needs. Around 1,200 other school districts are taking similar legal action against social media companies. But social media isn’t all bad, all the time. It can provide opportunities for some people, including those from marginalized groups, to form connections that might otherwise be difficult. A 2024 survey of LGBTQ+ teenagers found that while some described social media as a place of rejection and fear, others described it as a place where they felt a sense of belonging, where they could develop friendships and cultivate their identity. In truth, we can’t definitively say what effects using social media is having on children across the board, says Mark. “There have been lots and lots of studies, and the evidence is to date inconclusive,” she told me. (Despite what you might read in best-selling books on the subject.) Mark is hopeful that large, long-term studies might finally start shedding a bit more light on this question. An effort of this nature is underway in Australia , which enacted a social media ban for under-16s at the end of last year. Given this uncertainty over a 20-year-old t