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Business Standard
a day ago
- Business Standard
Thinking capped: How generative AI may be quietly dulling our brains
It has been barely three years since generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT appeared on the scene, and there is already concern over how they might be affecting the human brain. The early prognosis isn't good. The findings of a recent study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, Wellesley College, and MassArt indicate that tools such as ChatGPT negatively impact the neural, linguistic, and cognitive capabilities of humans. While this study is preliminary and limited in scope, involving barely 54 subjects aged 18 to 34, it found that those who used ChatGPT for writing essays (as part of the research experiment) showed measurably lower brain activity than their peers who didn't. 'Writing without (AI) assistance increased brain network interactions across multiple frequency bands, engaging higher cognitive load, stronger executive control, and deeper creative processing,' it found. Various experts in India, too, reiterate the concerns of overdependence on AI, to the extent where people outsource even thinking to AI. Those dealing with the human brain define this as 'cognitive offloading' which, they caution, can diminish critical thinking and reasoning capability while also building a sense of social isolation – in effect, dragging humans into an 'idiot trap'. Training the brain to be lazy 'We now rely on AI for tasks we used to do ourselves — writing essays, solving problems, even generating ideas,' says Nitin Anand additional professor of clinical psychology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (Nimhans), Bengaluru. 'That means less practice in critical thinking, memory recall, and creative reasoning.' This dependence, he adds, is also weakening people's ability to delay gratification. 'AI tools are designed for speed. They answer instantly. But that trains people to expect quick solutions everywhere, reducing patience and long-term focus.' Anand warns that this behavioural shift is feeding into a pattern of digital addiction, which he classifies as the 4Cs: craving, compulsion, loss of control, and consequences (see box). 'When someone cannot stop checking their phone, feels restless without it, and suffers in real life because of it — that's addiction,' he says, adding that the threat of addiction towards technology has increased multifold by something as adaptive and customisable as AI. Children and adolescents are particularly at risk, says Pankaj Kumar Verma, consultant psychiatrist and director of Rejuvenate Mind Neuropsychiatry Clinic, New Delhi. 'Their prefrontal cortex — the brain's centre for planning, attention, and impulse control — is still developing,' he explains. 'Constant exposure to fast-changing AI content overstimulates neural circuits, leading to short attention spans, poor impulse control, and difficulty with sustained focus.' The effects don't stop at attention 'We're seeing a decline in memory retention and critical thinking, simply because people don't engage deeply with information anymore,' Verma adds. Even basic tasks like asking for directions or speaking to others are being replaced by AI, increasing social isolation, he says. Much of this harks back to the time when landlines came to be replaced by smartphones. Landline users rarely needed a phonebook — numbers of friends, family, and favourite shops were memorised by heart. But with mobile phones offering a convenient 'contacts' list, memory was outsourced. Today, most people can barely remember three-odd numbers unaided. With AI, such cognitive shifts will likely become more pronounced, the experts say. What looks like convenience today might well be shaping a future where essential human skills quietly fade away. Using AI without losing ourselves Experts agree that the solution is not to reject AI, but to regulate its use with conscious boundaries and real-world grounding. Verma advocates for structured rules around technology use, especially in homes with children and adolescents. 'Children, with underdeveloped self-regulation, need guidance,' he says. 'We must set clear boundaries and model balanced behaviour. Without regulation, we risk overstimulating developing brains.' To prevent digital dependence, Anand recommends simple, yet effective, routines that can be extended to AI use. The 'phone basket ritual', for instance, involves setting aside all devices in a common space at a fixed hour each day — usually in the evening — to create a screen-free window for family time or rest. He also suggests 'digital fasting': unplugging from all screens for six to eight hours once a week to reset attention and reduce compulsive use. 'These habits help reclaim control from devices and re-train the brain to function independently,' he says. Perhaps, digital fasting can be extended to 'AI fasting' during work and school assignments to allow the brain to engage in cognitive activities. Pratishtha Arora, chief executive officer of Social and Media Matters, a digital rights organisation, highlights the essential role of parental responsibility in shaping children's digital lives. 'Technology is inevitable, but how we introduce it matters,' she says. 'The foundation of a child's brain is laid early. If we outsource that to screens, the damage can be long-term.' She also emphasises the need to recognise children's innate skills and interests rather than plunging them into technology at an early age. Shivani Mishra, AI researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, cautions against viewing AI as a replacement for human intelligence. 'AI can assist, but it cannot replace human creativity or emotional depth,' she says. Like most experts, she too advises that AI should be used to reduce repetitive workload, 'and free up space for thinking, not to avoid thinking altogether'. The human cost According to Mishra, the danger lies not in what AI can do, but in how much we delegate to it, often without reflection. Both Anand and Verma share concerns about how its unregulated use could stunt core human faculties. Anand reiterates that unchecked dependence could erode the brain's capacity to delay gratification, solve problems, and tolerate discomfort. 'We're at risk of creating a generation of young people who are highly stimulated but poorly equipped to deal with the complexities of real life,' Verma says. The way forward, the experts agree, lies in responsible development, creating AI systems grounded in ethics, transparency, and human values. Research in AI ethics must be prioritised not just for safety, but also to preserve what makes us human in the first place, they advise. The question is not whether AI will shape the future; it is already doing so. It is whether humans will remain conscious architects of that future or passive participants in it. Writing without AI assistance leads to higher cognitive load engagement, stronger executive control, and deeper creative processing Writing with AI assistance reduces overall neural connectivity and shifts the dynamics of information flow Large language model (LLM) users noted a diminishing inclination to evaluate the output critically Participants who were in the brain-only group reported higher satisfaction and demonstrated higher brain connectivity, compared to other groups Essays written with the help of LLM carried less significance or value to the participants as they spent less time on writing and mostly failed to provide a quote from their essays
Gulf Insider
a day ago
- Health
- Gulf Insider
More Fetal Losses Than Expected After Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccination In Israel: Study
A higher-than-expected number of miscarriages and other forms of fetal loss were associated with COVID-19 vaccinations in Israel, a new study has revealed. Researchers found 13 fetal losses—four more than the nine expected—for every 100 pregnant women who received a COVID-19 vaccine during weeks eight to 13 in pregnancy, according to the study, which was published as a preprint on the medRxiv server. Most people in Israel, including pregnant women, received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer did not respond by publication time to a request for comment. The team behind the study includes Retsef Levi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher who was recently named to the committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines, and Dr. Tracy Hoeg, who works for the Food and Drug Administration. The researchers analyzed electronic health records from Maccabi Healthcare Services, one of four organizations that provide health care to Israelis. They looked at 226,395 pregnancies that occurred between March 1, 2016, and Feb. 28, 2022. The primary analysis looked at fetal loss for pregnant women after dose one or dose three of a COVID-19 vaccine, with fetal loss including miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth. The researchers came up with an expected number of fetal losses based on a model that drew from data before the COVID-19 pandemic, then compared the expected number of fetal losses with those that occurred from week eight of pregnancy onward. They identified 13,214 fetal losses after the COVID-19 pandemic started, compared with 12,846 fetal losses in the reference period, finding that women who received a COVID-19 vaccine during weeks eight to 13 in pregnancy experienced a higher-than-expected number of fetal losses. 'If you believe this result … every 100 women that you would vaccinate during weeks eight to 13, you are going to see close to four additional fetal losses,' Levi told The Epoch Times. The researchers cautioned that more information is required to say for sure that the vaccines cause fetal losses. They also noted that when they carried out the same analysis for pregnant women who received a COVID-19 vaccine during weeks 14 to 27, the number of fetal losses was lower than expected. An additional analysis of pregnant women who received an influenza vaccine from March 1, 2018, to Feb. 28, 2019, also found a lower-than-expected number of fetal losses. The researchers said those results could stem from what is known as healthy vaccine bias—the data could be skewed because people who receive vaccines are typically healthier than those who do not. Maccabi Healthcare Services did not return an inquiry by publication time. Dr. Yaakov Segal, head of obstetrics and gynecology medicine at the organization, is one of the paper's co-authors. Israel's Ministry of Health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which encourages pregnant women to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in any trimester, did not respond to requests for comment by publication time. 'Generally, medical advice to pregnant women follows the precautionary principle and is based on sound and careful research,' Josh Guetzkow, researcher with Hebrew University of Jerusalem and another study co-author, told The Epoch Times via email. 'Our study shows just how irresponsible it was for our health authorities to abandon these core principles.' COVID-19 vaccination was recommended for pregnant women in Israel and the United States early in the COVID-19 pandemic, even though the clinical trials for the vaccines excluded pregnant women. Moderna's clinical trial for pregnant women was ultimately terminated, while Pfizer ended its trial early after enrolling just 175 women. The latter found slightly lower COVID-19 incidence among the vaccinated when compared with those who received a placebo. Some observational studies have determined that pregnant women benefit from COVID-19 vaccination. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently narrowed its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and no longer advises COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy. The new paper was published as a preprint, without peer review. Levi said the paper had been rejected by two journals, and the authors decided that the implications were too important to continue to not release it to the public. Guetzkow said the researchers are going to keep trying to get the paper published by a journal.
Scientific American
2 days ago
- Science
- Scientific American
New Proof Dramatically Compresses Space Needed for Computation
Once upon a time computers filled entire rooms, reading numbers from spinning tapes and churning them through wires to do chains of basic arithmetic. Today they slip into our pockets, performing in a tiny fraction of a second what used to take hours. But even as chips shrink and gain speed, theorists are flipping the question from how much computation space we can pack into a machine to how little is enough to get the job done. This inquiry lies at the heart of computational complexity, a measure of the limits of what problems can be solved and at what cost in time and space. For nearly 50 years theorists believed that if solving a problem takes t steps, it should also need roughly t bits of memory—the 0s and 1s that a machine uses to record information. (Technically, that equation was t/ log(t), but for the numbers involved log(t) is typically negligibly small.) If a task involves 100 steps, for instance, you'd expect to need at least 100 bits, enough to diligently log each step. Using fewer bits was thought to require more steps—like alphabetizing your books by swapping them one by one on the shelf instead of pulling them all out and reshelving them. But in a surprising finding described this week at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing in Prague, Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist Ryan Williams found that any problem solvable in time t needs only about √ t bits of memory: a 100-step computation could be compressed and solved with something on the order of 10 bits. 'This result shows the prior intuition is completely false,' Williams says. 'I thought there must be something wrong [with the proof] because this is extremely unexpected.' The breakthrough relies on a 'reduction,' a means of transforming one problem into another that may seem unrelated but is mathematically equivalent. With reductions, packing a suitcase maps onto determining a monthly budget: the size of your suitcase represents your total budget, pieces of clothing correspond to potential expenses, and carefully deciding which clothes can fit is like allocating your budget. Solving one problem would then directly solve the other. This idea is at the core of Williams's result: any problem can be transformed into one you can solve by cleverly reusing space, deftly cramming the necessary information into just a square-root number of bits. Thus, the original problem must be solvable with this compact container. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. 'This progress is unbelievable,' says Mahdi Cheraghchi, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. 'Before this result, there were problems you could solve in a certain amount of time, but many thought you couldn't do so with such little space.' Williams's finding, he adds, is 'a step in the right direction that we didn't know how to take.' While computers have continued to shrink, our theoretical understanding of their efficiency has exploded, suggesting that the real constraint is not how much memory we have but how wisely we use it.
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Business Standard
3 days ago
- Politics
- Business Standard
MIT sued by student, instructor over alleged antisemitism on campus
Lior Alon, a Jewish Israeli mathematics instructor, and William Sussman, a Jewish former PhD student, sued the Cambridge-based research university in Boston federal court Bloomberg The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was sued by an instructor and a former student who claim the school's administration failed to address a 'hostile anti-Semitic environment' on campus following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel by Hamas. Lior Alon, a Jewish Israeli mathematics instructor, and William Sussman, a Jewish former PhD student, sued the Cambridge-based research university in Boston federal court Wednesday. They accused MIT of failing to respond to a 'surge' of hatred, making it difficult for them to participate in campus life and depriving them of educational and professional opportunities. 'These incidents are emblematic of a larger problem on the MIT campus where antisemitism has been permitted to take root and fester in the absence of leadership and accountability,' according to their complaint. MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell said the university would defend itself against the allegations in court. 'To be clear, MIT rejects antisemitism,' McDonnell said, citing statements by MIT President Sally Kornbluth shortly after the Hamas attack in 2023. 'Antisemitism is real, and it is rising in the world,' Kornbluth said in a video address at the time. 'We cannot let it poison our community.' The lawsuit comes as the Trump administration has targeted elite universities over claims of antisemitism and their response to campus protests following the Hamas attacks and Israel's war in Gaza. Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union. In a high-profile battle, Harvard University is fighting President Donald Trump in court after the administration froze billions in funds to the university and blocked it from enrolling international students. The Trump administration's actions are rooted in its charge that Harvard has 'failed to condemn antisemitism.' Alon and Sussman are seeking a court order forcing MIT to enforce its non-discrimination and harassment policies against antisemitic conduct. They're backed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center Coalition to Combat antisemitism, which is also a plaintiff in the suit. Alon is also suing for defamation, claiming an MIT professor conducted a false, online 'smear campaign' against him, which he claims led to 'aggressive' public confrontations, and that the MIT administration failed to take action to enforce university rules.
Scoop
3 days ago
- Science
- Scoop
The New 3D Chip Technology That Could Accelerate Smartphones And Conserve Energy
Gallium nitride (GaN), the second most widely employed semiconductor material globally after silicon, possesses unique qualities that render it extremely well-suited for applications such as lighting, radar systems, and power electronics. But its relatively high cost and complex integration processes have scared off massive adoption. In order to address this limitation, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), together with various institutions, has created a new manufacturing technique in which GaN transistors can be added reliably onto typical silicon-based chips. This breakthrough has three remarkable advantages: minimal cost, superior performance, and compatibility with existing fabrication processes. The heart of this technology is a precision laser-cutting process to isolate nanoscale GaN transistors (size: 240×410 micrometers) from wafers and subsequent accurate integration on silicon chips using a low-temperature copper bonding process. Unlike in conventional gold bonding implementations, copper bonding is below 400°C, achieving much lower costs without requiring high-end machinery. Distributed layout also enhances thermal dissipation, decreasing system temperatures as a whole. Following this approach, scientists have successfully designed high-power amplifiers with greater signal strength and energy efficiency than the typical silicon-based ones. Implemented in future smartphones, the technology can potentially deliver faster networking, extended battery life, and better communication quality. Also, its compatibility with existing semiconductor production lines makes it competitive not only for consumer electronics upgrades but for more advanced applications like quantum computing, where GaN at cryogenic temperatures is superior to silicon. By synergistic combination of silicon chip maturity manufacturing processes with GaN's exceptional material properties, this technology holds the potential to spur innovation in 5G communications, data centers, and quantum technologies, reshaping the future of the electronics industry.
