Your Brain on AI: The Shocking Decline in Creative Thinking (2025)

Our ability to solve complex problems without AI has plummeted 30% in just five years.

That's not just a statistic – it's the sound of your brain cells surrendering.

We are announcing a new series we are calling –  Creative Thinking in the AI Age – on strengthening your uniquely human creativity while using AI as a partner, not a replacement.

Today, we will explore how AI dependency is creating a pandemic of reduced creative thinking and why this matters more than you might realize.

Look around. We've all seen it – colleagues endlessly prompting AI for answers, friends asking their devices the same questions with slight variations, and kids who reach for ChatGPT before trying to solve a problem themselves. It's happening everywhere. We're witnessing a slow, subtle decline in our collective ability to think deeply, creatively, and independently.

This cognitive shift is measurable. Recent research from the University of Toronto found that college students today show a 42% decrease in divergent thinking scores – our ability to generate multiple solutions to problems – compared to students just five years ago. The difference? The widespread adoption of AI tools.

This isn't just happening in schools. Creative professionals show similar patterns. Marketing agencies report that junior staff increasingly struggle to generate original campaign concepts without AI prompting. Engineering teams face growing difficulties when asked to ideate without computational assistance.

But this isn't a rant against technology. AI is here to stay, and it offers tremendous benefits. The real issue is how our relationship with these tools is reshaping our cognitive capabilities.

Remember when calculators became widespread? Many feared we'd lose our ability to do basic math. They weren't entirely wrong, but we adapted. The difference now is that AI doesn't just handle calculations – it's beginning to think for us.

This surrender of our thinking faculties brings us to an uncomfortable but powerful concept from theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Writing from a Nazi prison in 1943, he described a phenomenon he called "stupidity" – not as a lack of intelligence, but as a social contagion where independent thinking is surrendered to external forces.

Bonhoeffer wasn't talking about AI, obviously. But his insight that humans will easily surrender their thinking faculties to external authorities is profoundly relevant today. We're increasingly outsourcing our cognitive heavy lifting to algorithms, and our brains are adapting accordingly.

Let me show you what I mean with a quick demonstration. Take 30 seconds right now to list five uncommon uses for a paperclip. No use of AI. I'll wait.

How'd you do? If you struggled, you're not alone. In tests conducted before widespread AI adoption, the average person could generate 8-12 unique ideas. Today, that number has dropped to 3-5.

This decline in creative thinking ability is not only disappointing – it has neurological implications. When we regularly outsource thinking, the neural pathways associated with creative problem-solving literally weaken. It's cognitive atrophy – it's like any other muscle, use it or lose it. And with AI, you aren’t using it.

The consequences are more serious than you might think. Here's what's happening: AI is great at finding the optimal solution within defined boundaries using "convergent thinking." Give AI the parameters of a problem, and it'll efficiently identify the best answers within a set of constraints.

But what humans uniquely excel at is "divergent thinking" – our ability to break through boundaries, reimagine the entire problem, and make unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. This is where breakthroughs happen. Recent research from the University of Bergen shows that while AI can generate more ideas than the average person, the most c