Key points
- New research will map brain activity while using AI to determine what helps and hinders.
- The objective is to build new interaction approaches that enable AI to unlock our potential.
- The study also hopes to provide insight into whether AI enhances human production rather than replacing it.
Against a backdrop of studies that suggest artificial intelligence (AI) is rewiring our brains, making usstupider, or easing our mental load to the detriment of critical thinking, a new study is set to evaluate whether certain contextual applications can actually make us better at thinking. That was certainly the stance of one panel at Davos a couple of years ago, where a panel on education suggested that AI could pave the way for smarter thinking if we are prepared to embrace the changes needed and to mitigate the risks in how it is applied.
New USC Study on AI and Thinking Skills
A new USC research study, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is set to look at the use of AI by doctors, journalists, and software engineers and consider whether using AI can strengthen creativity and critical thinking. This investigation follows previous studies, such as the one by Stadler et al. (2024), which highlights that AI use eases mental load but at the expense of our knowledge and depth of understanding, and a study from MIT (Kos’myna et al., 2025), which found that AI reduces our recall and critical thinking and our long-term acquisition of skills.
As AI becomes a more fundamental, embedded reality of our working lives, the USC study will look at how humans and AI interact to maximise creative and critical thinking. The goal is to advance current thinking on the use of AI, and consider whether there is scope to use it to enhance a person’s capacity for creativity, and ultimately to design an interaction framework to enable stronger human-AI synergy
Monitoring Brain Activity With and Without AI During Creative and Critical Thinking
The study will identify how users interact with AI interfaces, and which type of interaction is best for sparking creativity or critical thinking. They will also work to identify the alternative: which interactions are most damaging to collaboration and creativity, and should be avoided in creative fields. Participants will be asked to complete job-related tasks using AI systems alongside a control group that will do the same without AI access. Participants’ brain activity will then be monitored using electroencephalography (EEG), which will help map how ideas are formed and connected during the thinking process. Different regions of the brain become active during different types of cognitive processing, which, when compared to neutral data, will help to identify signals for creativity and critical thinking.
Critical thinking is often associated with the pre-frontal cortex, and creativity triggers sudden bursts of neural activity as well as focused attention in the brain’s visual regions. This brain activity will be identifiable on the EEG and will be mapped against task type and AI usage to identify when AI can be used to encourage creative or critical thinking, and when the opposite is true
Researcher Souti Chattopadhyay comments, “Creativity is something that’s inherently human. This project is built on the philosophy that AI can enhance people’s ability to create and think, but it cannot replace it.”
The study also hopes to provide insight into other pressing questions that surround AI usage, including whether it creates cognitive blind spots, whether it diminishes our ability to recognise fact from fiction, and whether we can adopt AI in a way that enhances human production rather than replacing it
Launched this month, the $600,000 project will be carried out over five years and divided into two phases. The first phase will work on classification, looking to detect specific moments that expand or narrow participants’ thinking, ultimately building a map of what helps and what hinders. The second phase will build on this knowledge of the patterns, barriers, and opportunities to redesign how we should optimise interactions for better creativity and critical thinking
The study findings may lend increased understanding to the idea originally articulated at Davos, that if we can embrace AI in the right way and mitigate its negative impacts, we can unlock significant gains in education and beyond
USC Viterbi, School of Engineering. (2026, July 28). Can AI make us better thinkers? USC researcher studies how human and AI think together by looking at brain signals – USC Viterbi | School of Engineering. https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2026/07/can-ai-make-us-better-thinke…
Kos’myna, N. (n.d.). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task – MIT Media Lab. MIT Media Lab. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
Matthias Stadler, Maria Bannert, Michael Sailer, Cognitive ease at a cost: LLMs reduce mental effort but compromise depth in student scientific inquiry, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 160, 2024, published: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2024.108386
