Dr Ragnar Purje
When digital devices replace self-motivated, effortful learning, the brain undergoes measurable, profound neurological changes: working memory becomes overloaded by constant task switching and digital interruptions, preventing the consolidation of information into long-term memory. The prefrontal cortex—the executive centre responsible for focus, inhibition, and sustained reasoning—activates less frequently in digital environments, leading to reduced synaptic strengthening, weakened top-down control over attention and complex cognition, and diminished potential for self-directed learning behaviour.
As a result, complex deep-learning neurological pathways fail to form because fragmented attention disrupts the neural processes required for comprehension, intellectual analysis, sophisticated cognitive elaboration, and retention. This ongoing reduction in cognitive effort (where AI presents all the information) also leads to reduced myelination, diminishing processing speed, associated personal effort, and mental stamina.
Taken together, these neurological and cognitive effects erode executive function, which involves deep, sophisticated thinking and analysis, as well as complex, reflective reasoning. All of this undermines the development of higher-order thinking and reasoning, as well as the neural circuits required to compare, contrast, evaluate, and integrate highly sophisticated information. This, then, is not a process of neurological and cognitive advancement. However, it most certainly is an ongoing process of neurological and cognitive regression.
AI is here to stay and—exponentially—it is becoming more powerful by the day. However, the immense technological power of AI cannot replace what is required for skills, knowledge and learning to take place. The evidence for this became clear following a 20-year study titled “The $30 Billion Experiment: How a National Push for Classroom Technology Produced a Less Cognitively Capable Generation.”
The intention was to modernise learning and accelerate achievement
This $30 billion national push to digitise American classrooms began in 2002 with the State of Maine’s one-to-one laptop program and was significantly expanded by 2024. According to the research, the intention was to modernise learning, democratise access to information, and accelerate achievement. Yet two decades of data now show the opposite: a measurable decline in students’ cognitive capabilities.
Despite sustained investment and effort, student scores in Maine never improved, foreshadowing national outcomes later confirmed by neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath. In 2026, Horvath informed the U.S. Senate that Gen Z is the first modern generation to perform worse than the one before it in literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving, with declines strongly correlated with increased school-based screen time.
Generation Z refers to people born roughly between 1997 and 2012 and is socially recognised as the first cohort to grow up in a social environment where they can choose to be fully immersed in the internet, smartphones, and social media.
Twenty years of evidence
Crucially, Horvath stresses that young people are not at fault; the failure exists in the application of policies and procedures that assumed that more technology would automatically produce and advance critical thinking and more advanced learning (in the form of skills, knowledge, insights, and deep reflective understanding). However, as 20 years of evidence have shown (much to everyone’s surprise), this did not happen.
Millions of years of evidence
As millions of years of empirical evidence from history have shown (since the first humans walked on this earth), all advancements (across all disciplines) have been achieved only through the sustained application of self-motivated, self-initiated, and unrelenting mental and physical effort. And in absolute terms, as noted by 20 years of research, more technology, which now also means AI (in terms of what is required for human learning to take place), is not the answer.
For human skills, knowledge, and learning to take place, effort must begin at birth and continue throughout the early years of development, extending into all primary and secondary school years. After secondary school, there are all manner of options and disciplines. All of which also require many more years of ongoing personal effort to achieve and advance skills, knowledge, competence, and merit.
Over the years and into the forever future, AI can and will – in microseconds – provide answers to every question, assignment, test and exam that will ever be devised. This will also be supported by technological devices (which are now in place) that may even eventually be implanted in the human body.
For example, with AI now established in all spheres of society, and most certainly in education, vast numbers of students – 100, 200, 500, 10,000 or more – can now sit for 100 consecutive exams, answering any number of questions with AI providing all of the answers, resulting in 100 per cent accuracy across all tests and examinations. The outcome (i.e., the consequences of this process), with no required intellectual effort on the part of the students, will result in all of these students essentially having zero skills and knowledge
However, in absolute terms, if human skills, knowledge, learning, and understanding are to develop (as millions of years of evolution have proven), humans must personally and continually apply mental and physical effort (from birth onwards) and continue to do so for the rest of their lives. There is, self-evidently, the opportunity and choice not to apply effort.
If we choose – and it is a choice – to not apply effort and use AI for answers (in place of effort when effort is actually required), there will, as the evidence indicates, be non-learning consequences. However, all of this, of course, can change with the implementation of policies and procedures that develop, advance and enhance the ways in which humans are required to learn and develop their skills and knowledge. AI – The Powerful – is here to stay, but what about the skills and knowledge of humans?
The insights of history
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). “Nothing great was ever accomplished without effort.” (Immanuel Kant). “Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind.” (Leonardo da Vinci). “I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.” (Marie Curie). “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” (Albert Einstein).
Dr. Ragnar Purje (PhD; M.Ed.; M.Ed.(Guid.& Couns.); M.Ed.(Lead.&Man.); B.A. (Psych.); B.App.Sc. (P.E.); Grad.Dip.Ed.; Grad.Dip.SportSci.; Grad.Dip.Ex.&SportSci.; Grad.Cert.(Comm.); Grad.Dip.(Health Couns.); Certificate IV in Assess.&Workplace Training). Author of Responsibility Theory®. Adjunct Senior Lecturer at CQUniversity. Classroom Behaviour Specialist.