Author: Nita Farahany Source: https://nitafarahany.substack.com/p/what-ai-does-to-your-thinking Published: January 21, 2026
"What AI Does To Your Thinking" is the second installment (Class 1.2 of roughly 30) of an essay series by Nita Farahany documenting her Advanced Topics in AI Law and Policy course, published on her Substack on January 21, 2026. The essay surveys cognitive-science evidence that heavy AI and digital use produces measurable changes in attention, working memory, deep-reading capacity, and metacognition, and argues that these effects are not evenly distributed. Farahany presents the class as the empirical predicate for the course's later legal arguments.
Summary
The essay reviews research on how AI and digital tools alter cognition, organized around cognitive offloading, the variation in skill outcomes among users, attention fragmentation, and the consequences for legal concepts of autonomy and consent.
Farahany frames cognitive offloading as double-edged. Outsourcing memory and arithmetic to devices can free working memory for higher-order tasks, an effect she labels the "tool" use of a technology. Offloading reasoning itself to AI, by contrast, can atrophy the underlying skill, the "substitute" effect. The line between the two, she argues, is determined by how a user engages with the tool rather than by the tool itself.
From this distinction the essay derives what Farahany calls a "critical thinking gap." Users who treat AI output as a starting point for their own reasoning gain skill, while users who treat AI output as the answer lose it. She argues this produces a widening gap between "AI-tutor" and "AI-substitute" users that maps onto pre-existing educational and class divides.
On attention, the essay cites evidence that smartphone notification environments produce measurable declines in sustained attention, with recovery from interruption averaging about 23 minutes. It notes that the effect persists even when the phone is silent or absent, citing Ward et al. (2017) for the finding that the mere presence of a phone produces "brain drain."
Farahany ties these findings to autonomy. If the cognitive substrate of decision-making is being reshaped below conscious awareness by environments people did not design, she argues, then the legal premise of meaningful consent, understood as informed, voluntary, and capable, is destabilized.
Relationships
- part-of: Nita Farahany Advanced Topics course (Class 1.2 of ~30)
- related: AI Deskilling, Cognitive Friction, AI Mental Health and Psychological Harm
- previous: Inside My Advanced Topics in AI Law and Policy Class 1: From How AI Works to What AI Does (Farahany, January 2026) next: Inside My Advanced Topics Class 1.3: Protecting Autonomy in Law, Take 1 (Farahany, January 2026)