AI is everywhere today it is no longer a question of are you using AI but rather the question is which AI are you using are you on charg are you on Google's Gemini are you using perplexity or claude that's what we are asking each other today and just like any technological revolution that has happened in the past there is a lot of questions around is this going to be helpful is it going to harm us so in today's video I want to take a deep dive into how can AI affect our brains what can we expect AI to be doing to us in the future i'm Dr sidarth Warrior i'm a neurologist and welcome to my YouTube channel where we talk about your brain and your health if you've not subscribed yet do so it means a lot to me and plus you'll see such videos on your timeline so in order to understand how AI will be affecting your brain and it will affect your brain let's look at how has technology affected us in the past so if you look at history technology has always developed with one goal in mind which is to make your brain's life easier so whatever it is that your brain is trying to do technology has evolved so that it can take some of that workload away from the brain so let's look at the brain piece by piece to understand what has technology done to help the brain so if this is your brain there is a part called as the motor cortex now the function of the motor cortex is to act to do action to move things so the first thing that technology did was to help human beings move better now you can also argue that it's not just the motor cortex but rather the entire body the muscles and the bones of your body had the job of moving you and moving other things in your environment machines took over a significant part of our job in movement the next part of the brain that started outsourcing its job to machines was the hippo campus the hippocampus is a small structure in our brain in the shape of a seahorse and it has the job of converting information things that we learn into long-term memory so it stores memory in our brain and as you all know with the use of phones and laptops we no longer remember phone numbers we have trouble remembering addresses because of Google maps a lot of us may not remember the way to reach somewhere all this information at one point would have been stored in our brain but now we have started outsourcing it to technology another interesting brain skill that we once had but now we have outsourced is chronoperception or the awareness of time and this is controlled in a brain part called as the hypothalamus the hypothalamus is responsible for the circadian rhythm which is how your body changes based on whether it is day or night and at one point in time our body was so tuned to this dayight cycle that at any point you would know what time of the day it is in fact you may have noticed even in your house your grandparents might not need to look at the clock as much as you do but again because of our overd dependence on technology we now need to look at a digital device to know what time it is and another thing that we've been outsourcing to technology over the last 50 60 years is entertainment and pleasure and that is decided by the dopamine network in the brain earlier before we all had screens in our pockets in order to find entertainment we would have to put in some effort we may have to leave the house go somewhere watch a play watch theater or at least do something which requires some amount of effort but that started changing once we got television and then mobile phones which means we no longer need to do anything much or go very far to find entertainment so that is the story so far but now comes the tricky bit because if you notice we have only talked about the brain areas in the primitive part of our brain so far that is the lyic system the dopamine network the hippocampus but with the advent of AI we have finally started outsourcing the things that our preffrontal cortex used to do because remember the prefrontal cortex has the job of thinking of planning of calculating things deciding what you want to do in the future in short being a rational human being and this is the job that we are now outsourcing to AI and if you go deeper into this I would say there are two types of thinking one is thinking about how do you want to do something that you know you want for example you want to cook a biryani and you are looking to the internet to figure out how to do it so this is more of an operational kind of thinking so I would say this is a how sort of thinking but there's also a deeper level of thinking which is about what do you want to do in your life and that can be a conceptual sort of thinking and I would say over the last 10 to 20 years we have all been using the internet to figure out how to do things you know what you want to do but the internet will tell you how but today with charge GPT with AI for the first time in history we are turning towards technology to figure out the what what is it that you want to do more and more people are turning to AI and asking AI to tell them what should they do what should they eat what should they wear and this is where I believe we are crossing a very important line because that sort of thinking that critical thinking about our own purpose our own identity that is what makes us human this ability of the prefrontal cortex to think is a very precious one and most animals don't have it and even we as human beings have had it for a very short amount of time the idea of outsourcing this valuable skill to AI seems like a dangerous one to me but now that we are already here and this is already happening let's take a look at what is going to happen what is going to happen next so my prediction is that the next parts of the brain that will get outsourced is the parts that does the seeing and the hearing so already we are talking about AI glasses that can filter whatever it is that you are seeing and only highlight those pieces of information that you need to see we're already talking about AI filters in your earphones that can block out unnecessary sounds and only let those sounds through that the AI thinks that you need to hear in other words if AI can filter out your sight and sound it is filtering out your reality so we are heading towards a world where the AI decides what should you see what should you hear and what should you think and that to me is a dangerous world my hypothesis is that just like how today we all agree that exercise is very important and we all should go to the gym the reason we all say that is because now movement is not taken for granted we can't live a life without moving and we know how dangerous it is that's why we are stressing on exercise similarly I would say that in another 20 to 50 years we will be living in a world where thinking is optional there might even be brain gyms or thinking gyms where people can go and exercise their prefrontal cortex because otherwise they don't really need to ai will take care of all the thinking that is needed and if you think that you don't want to live in such a world that this sounds too dystopian the time to act is now do not give up the practice of thinking do not outsource critical thinking to AI if you want to solve a problem try to solve it roughly by yourself at least have a rough draft of what is it that you're looking for then you can use AI to refine it or look for other ideas but if you outsource the what to AI then it is going to take away the soul of you the core of you i sincerely hope that a lot of the fears that I've expressed in this video are overhyped and it doesn't actually come about but I would still say let's take this video as a warning .
By Sindarth Warrior Nurologist