Twenty-eight years ago, two philosophers published an article that would forever alter the way we view the psychology. They proposed a premise in which the brain stopped drawing the boundaries of human cognition. The thesis, known as the Extended Mind theory, argued that our surroundings are also part of our thinking process. That if you kept a notebook to jot down ideas, a map to guide you, or a magazine with guides you turned to before passing a video game, all of that also formed part of the cognitive process.
Although the practice has faded, consulting tricks and guides from Hobby Consolas, Micromanía, or the Nintendo Action of the moment, was a habit we all shared as we grew up in the 80s and 90s. What we didn’t know back then wasn’t only that we were part of a philosophical revolution that would eventually ripple through cognitive psychology, but that we were also preparing ourselves for the use of LLMs.
How we learned to think in the 80s and 90s
When we talk about the brain, we forget not only that the theory of the Extended Mind exists, but that psychology has been speaking for years about two types of memory. On one hand, there is storage memory, the ability to take an external datum and stash it in our minds. On the other, there is transactive memory, the capacity to know at any moment when and how we can access the correct information, even if it isn’t etched permanently in our memory.
Although many of us grew up in an environment obsessed with the first, with those exams that forced you to memorize thousands of concepts that you then dumped onto the test day and never remembered again, today’s education pursues the second. If we live in a world where information and the possibilities of accessing it are infinite, you must know how to navigate that universe of knowledge.
It’s not something new to us, even though the schooling system’s hammering pointed in another direction. We had collectible encyclopedias, tackled the early internet search engines, and, just as, learned to find and decipher the information those game guides offered—even if they weren’t clear or as specific and useful as a YouTube video is today.
In that process, we were activating what psychologists have come to call cognitive offloading. Broadly speaking, it is the ability to identify a problem, remember where we had stored the information to overcome it, and turn to it to integrate it into the cognitive process.
However, from the “go there and defeat the monster” stance, we’ve moved to a “Do you see this path? It’s right here,” and we’ve seasoned it with a “to finish it off, dodge this attack this way and climb onto that rock to shoot it.” That’s a problem.
The generation that best understands Google and the LLMs
The mental muscle we spent years training has made Millennials the generation that most adeptly understands the internet and how to maneuver through it. It doesn’t matter if we were born without a computer and a phone in hand—their era was forged in the dullest stretch of that universe. If you ask generations a step up or down about how to search for something on Google in the most efficient way, you’ll understand just how fundamental the shift has been.
By blending the knowledge we already possessed with the searches we performed, whether in those early search engines or in the indexes of those paper guides, we learned to use a combined knowledge that, sadly, current generations have not needed to shape.
Having grown up in an ecosystem where the algorithms themselves already give you the answer before you even formulate the question, that habit does not exist, and, by extension, the muscle that improves the cognitive process weakens. The LLMs do not come to change that scenario, but to worsen it even more. Grabbing onto language models like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude implies that search is no longer even that. There is doubt and there is answer, deteriorating along the way the process that, in a twist of fate, creates an even greater paradox.
In the same way that newer generations do not know how to search on Google, or at least not with the same efficacy as those who grew up in the 80s and 90s at the dawn of the internet, their use of tools like language models is also lagging.
Although everything points to LLMs becoming their main source of information from now on, they need targeted training on how to query information, judge it, and integrate it. If you grew up among those guides, you’re probably among those who find it absurd how today’s youth fall into the most ridiculous traps of misinformation. You may now better understand why that happens.
Image | Nasmunstrausse in Midjourney
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