When we hear "Google it or ask the AI" for every question, we like to portray ourselves as modern, hyper-connected beings of intelligence. We consider ourselves efficient, globally informed, constantly ready to fish any fact from the cloud. Yet, psychologically speaking, this attitude is pure self-deception - a collective planned unlearning.
The paper 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑀𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑦 𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑜𝑥 (Oakley et al., 2025) exposes this digital narcissism: our brains do not deteriorate because we are stupid, but because we voluntarily stop using them. We want skills without knowledge and creativity without foundations. But without laboriously formed schemas, thinking remains just theatre.
Psychologically speaking, learning is not consumption but a transformation. Each new piece of knowledge becomes stable only through repeated retrieval, making mistakes, and correcting them. This is exactly what we prevent today when we instantly externalise every uncertainty. Instead of experiencing a mistake as a valuable 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝐸𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟 (the engine of neuroplasticity), we leave it to ChatGPT to learn. The result: we no longer remember even the basic structures, just the hint of where we might find something.
This is like calling a delivery service instead of using a cookbook and believing you are a master chef. Knowledge is not a ready meal, it is a muscle. It degenerates without training.
Even more absurd: precisely in an era when we babble about critical thinking, creative leadership, and innovation, we refuse to do the fundamental groundwork: internalising knowledge foundations. "Look it up" becomes the ideological excuse to avoid effort. Neuropsychologically, this means: no engrams, no deep neural patterns, no schemas. Therefore, no genuine creativity.
Because creativity is not a spontaneous miracle, but the unexpected interplay of internalised structures.
Today, we live in a cognitive pseudo-economy: attention is the new currency, and efficiency means consuming as quickly as possible rather than processing. But psychologically, we are turning ourselves into mental illiterates; functionally competent, yet structurally incompetent.
The bitter irony: precisely in an era of infinite data abundance, internalised knowledge would be our greatest competitive advantage. Those who truly think can use machines better, rather than being led by them. But this requires work, mistakes, frustration. And that, we want to avoid at all costs.
The paper is a manifesto against intellectual laziness. Without memory in our heads, we are not free thinkers, but merely dependent puppets.
Perhaps, then, we should be less proud of being able to look up and generate everything. Instead, we should start to remember something again. Because our brain is exactly built for that purpose.
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