Nobody Felt the Muscle Go

MIT professor Eric So published a book this month called The Collision: What AI Does to Us. In it, he documents what researchers are calling cognitive atrophy — the gradual weakening of critical thinking and memory in people who rely heavily on AI tools. The findings are unsettling but not surprising. When you stop using a muscle, it doesn't complain. It just shrinks.

I've been turning this over in my mind. Not because I'm against AI — I use it daily. But because the pattern So describes is one I recognize from other places. We offload what feels inconvenient. Then we forget we offloaded it. Then we forget we ever did it ourselves.

Thinking is inconvenient. That's the truth nobody puts on a slide. The confusion before understanding, the wrong turns before the right one, the hours spent circling something before it resolves — that's not a flaw in human cognition. That is human cognition. The struggle is the process. The process is the skill.

When AI gives you the answer before you've fully formed the question, it's doing something generous. But it's also doing something dangerous. It's removing the friction that builds the muscle. And the muscle, once gone, doesn't announce its absence. You simply reach for the tool faster next time. Not because you chose to. Because the alternative now feels unfamiliar.

This is how atrophy works. Not with pain, but with ease.

I notice it in small ways. A question surfaces in my mind, and before I even turn it over — before I sit with it, before I let it bother me — I'm already typing it somewhere. The gap between wondering and knowing has collapsed. And in that collapse, something was lost. Not information. Something quieter. The capacity to hold a question without immediately resolving it. The willingness to be uncertain for a while.

There's a line in Proverbs that says the simple believe anything, but the prudent give thought to their steps. The warning isn't about bad information. It's about skipping the thinking. Believing isn't the same as understanding. Receiving an answer isn't the same as arriving at one.

I'm not suggesting we abandon tools. I'm suggesting we notice what we're trading when convenience removes struggle. The mind, like the body, was built for resistance. Not because suffering is good — but because growth lives on the other side of effort.

The question isn't whether AI can think for us. Clearly, it can. The question is whether we remember that thinking was the point — not the obstacle.

If the muscle is already going, the first sign won't be pain. It'll be relief. And that's the part that should worry us.