Project Vision 21

Exactly 170 years ago, American thinker and writer Henry David Thoreau complained about countries that focus on solving pressing problems with no intention of changing the way of thinking that led to the creation and perpetuation of those problems. Thoreau then coined an unpleasant but descriptive expression: brain rot.
 

In the conclusion of Walden, written in 1854, Thoreau wrote: “While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”.
 

The influential transcendentalist was referring to the “rotten potatoes” caused by the expansion in Europe of a fungoid that infected and destroyed potato crops for eight years (1845-1852), an event known as the Irish Famine.
 

For Thoreau, it was (and still is) nonsense to worry about curing rotten potatoes without worrying at all about the intellectual and moral decay that he characterized as “brain-rot.” More than a century and a half later, that phrase acquired new relevance in the context of the impact that artificial intelligence has on the human brain.
 

So much has been the recent use of “rotten brain” that the phrase was selected at the end of 2024 by Oxford University Press as “the phrase of the year.” In these first weeks of 2025, three alarming studies confirm that Thoreau was right: due to AI and other technologies, we are losing our ability to communicate properly and think critically.
 

For example, an article, published in PlosOne and written by Lucas G Gago-Galvagno and collaborators, analyzed the interaction between the use of “screens” (smartphones, tablets) in early childhood and the development of the cognitive skills of those children. The researchers concluded that there is a “negative association” between those two elements.
 

Specifically, the more time young children spend in front of a screen, the less vocabulary they acquire and the longer it takes them to progress with their language development. Obviously, the issue does not end there because the same thing is happening among adults.
 

In another study, experts from Carnegie Mellon University (in Pennsylvania) and Microsoft published a specialized article in which they studied the impact of generative AI on critical thinking.
 

The experts concluded that the more a person trusts AI, the less critically that person thinks because the less they trust their own ability to think for themselves. Even worse, says the study, the uncritical use of AI “changes the nature of critical thinking” and transforms it into mere “information verification.”
 

Recently, Shelly Palmer, a renowned expert in new technologies, argued in an article that AI and large language models will lead to “homogenizing human thought” by delegating all “searching, writing and decision-making” to AI, eliminating the “intellectual friction” that leads to innovation. “We will forget how to think differently,” Palmer said.
 

“Brain rot” is not just an unpleasant phrase. We are very close to being unable to think critically and speak clearly. What kind of world will be a world where children can’t talk, and adults can’t think? Our world, of course.