There has been quite a bit of research that shows relying on artificial intelligence tools encourages people to stop thinking critically and start deferring to the machine. But you’d be shocked at just how quickly your brain can shut off if you let it. According to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA, just a 10-minute session with an AI assistant can lead to users significantly abandoning their own capacity for reasoning. To show cognitative offloading in action, the researchers gave two groups of people—one aided by AI assistants and one operating entirely on their own. The participants who were given AI assistants (in this case, a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model) would have the aid pulled from them without warning during the test, and were left to solve the final three questions on their own. The study tested two different skills: first, giving a group a set of fraction-based arithmetic problems, and then a set of SAT-style reading comprehension questions.…