• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 4 hours ago

OpenAI last week released GPT-6 Astra, claiming it is the world’s most intelligent model.

Last year, an MIT Media Lab study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task" was conducted by researchers who used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor students as they wrote essays.

The EEG activity discovered that using ChatGPT for writing tasks causes a 32% reduction in active mental effort and a significant decrease in brain connectivity. In other words -- reducing critical thinking skills.

MIT Media Lab's study and OpenAI's September 2026 release of GPT-6 Astra presents a critical question on "cognitive debt.">

As OpenAI President Greg Brockman ushered in what he termed the “AGI era,” (artificial general intelligence), which he described as a model that no longer just answers prompts, but autonomously executes multi-step workflows across software, web pages and spreadsheets.

OpenAI designated Astra as the world's most intelligence AI system and its first model to reach the “Critical” cybersecurity-capabilities. It does not have its own browser, but it features native and highly advanced agentic browser capabilities that allow it to autonomously interact with standard browsers to complete tasks like a human. 

It works across browsers, spreadsheets, websites and desktop apps to create finished documents and complete multiple steps in workflows instead of telling you how to do them.

"Welcome to the AGI era," Greg Brockman, the company's president, said at the end of a press call announcing the arrival of OpenAI's Astra model, according to Business Insider.

If GPT-6 Astra has reached AGI (artificial general intelligence), where AI can match human cognitive capabilities across virtually all tasks, what happens to the human brain over time?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private university, focused on research to determine the “cognitive cost” of using large language models (LLM) in the educational context of writing an essay.

MIT assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, and Brain-only group, where each participant used a designated tool to write an essay.

In the final of four sessions, MIT asked LLM group participants to use no tools. The participants who used only their brains also used a LLM.

Fifty-four participants were recruited for sessions 1, 2, 3, and 18 participants for session 4.

Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record participants' brain activity to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load, and to gain a deeper understanding of neural activations during the essay writing task.

The AI technology does not make people “stupid,” “dumb,” or cause “brain rot,” according to the study’s authors, but it did prove “brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain-only group exhibited the strongest, widest-ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling.”

LLM-to-Brain participants in session 4, which took about four months, showed weaker neural connectivity and under-engagement of alpha and beta networks; and the brain-to-LLM participants demonstrated higher memory recall, among other things.

The study suggests “a possible decrease in learning skills based on the preliminary results.” The use of LLM had a measurable impact on participants, and while the benefits were initially apparent, the LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring.

The findings do not directly address advertising, but in a study conducted a year ago, MIT suggested LLM can stifle critical thinking over time, impacting decision quality. The future is a combination of AI and human thinking. 

This is an educational study, but its implications span advertising, copywriting, and marketing.

Here is a breakdown of who this affects in the advertising ecosystem and how. The findings imply that if ad copywriters use AI as their first line of thought, campaigns will suffer. They also note that participants who used their brains first and then transitioned to an LLM demonstrated higher memory recall and stronger neural engagement.

For creatives, AI should not write the first draft. The human must build the core premise, hook, and strategy before offering it up to the LLM.

Remember this famous 2008 article published in The Atlantic, written by Nicolas Carr? 

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory," Carr wrote. "My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose."

That is rarely the case anymore, he wrote, explaining how he loses his train of thought. 

The essay explored how internet search engines alter human cognition, and whether the technology diminishes concentration and deep reading or simply shifts intelligence toward utilitarian problem-solving. 

Now technology has pushed through to AGI, and some wonder if creativity is the next step in the process to go.