I am a big fan of cognitive offloading. It’s the act of using an external tool to reduce the amount of effort my brain has to put in to remember things. Calendars. Lists. Reminders. Bookmarks. Phone contacts. I even think writing has become cognitive offloading for me in a way. With all these ideas, worries, thoughts, and beliefs swirling in my head at a rapid pace, having a place to keep a living version of what I think and value frees up a bit of RAM in my head.
I am, however, a big hater of cognitive surrender. This phrase has become popular as of late in describing people who blindly follow whatever output AI gives them without actually thinking through it critically. The AI’s output becomes their output.
But I don’t really want to talk about AI. I think the hype around artificial intelligence and our insistence on utilizing it in unproductive ways is a symptom of cognitive surrender, not the actual disease.
There are studies that indicate utilizing external tools to hold memory can help us achieve our intentions, that the exercise of storing what we want to remember somewhere else can provide protection from our thoughts running amuck in our brain. Now, listen, I’m not a scholar, or a scientist, or even all that smart. So don’t take my word as fact. I’m just a nerd trying to figure out my life! But the anecdotal and scientific data I can find leads me to believe that external tools can make my ever overworked brain a little more efficient. So, to me, cognitive offloading gets a hearty thumbs up.
But at some point a line exists. I don’t quite know where this line is positioned. Maybe it depends on the type of tasks. But it’s the line where cognitive offloading becomes cognitive surrender. Where we’re no longer using external tools just to help us remember and be more efficient. It’s when we outsource all of our thinking to the machine or the tool. Where we let the tool do our thinking for us. This isn’t just about AI. We’re constantly looking for something, or someone, to hand the keys to our thinking to.
We outsource our worldview to the pundits, to preachers, gurus and philosophies. We look to a chatbot or self-help article to tell us our next steps. We want to fast forward through the thinking and arrive at the conclusion without going through the journey of wrestling with the ideas. We do this with our work and with our lives. Instead of freeing up our RAM, we leave our CPU on idle.
Efficiency is good.
But insight is better.
When we outsource our thinking to tools, we sacrifice our own insight on the altar of efficiency.