The study also showed that increased usage of AI was associated with a tendency among students to give up attempting to solve problems they otherwise would be able to tackle.
>A team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and the education company McGraw Hill examined a decade of data from a popular online learning tool by McGraw Hill, starting in 2015. Across millions of math sessions by a group that ranged from fifth graders to college students, the researchers compared performance from before 2022, when ChatGPT first came out, with the work that followed its arrival.
>A.I. tools condition people to expect immediate responses and deny them the experience of working through challenges, the authors say, which is crucial for skill development and one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/29/magazine/ai-chatbots-brain-development-study.html]
Category: BrainRot
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2026 – Does AI stop children from learning?
David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where AI adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group.
The drop in exam scores was concentrated among students who rushed their homework. Those who used AI but spent as long on assignments as non-users paid little penalty. What matters, then, is how pupils use the technology
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2024 – “Professors say students are coming into college with a host of new and alarming learning challenges, including fragmented and distracted thinking, along with sharper limits on what they are willing or able to do.”
Sophia Sarafova, an associate professor of biology at Davidson College, notes that at the start of her teaching career, 18 years ago, new students were able to synthesize and summarize information from multiple lectures on a topic to extract general principles they could apply in new situations.
“Not anymore,” she says.
“Note-taking now requires specific instruction on what to write down and how to organize it. Also, a lot of students are unable to rephrase a statement without changing the meaning, often in drastic ways that clearly contradict the core of the statement.”
https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-the-end-of-reading
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2026 – Citing middle-school level skills, UC faculty want to restore math, science testing for applicants
The letter cites a November report from UC San Diego’s Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions, which concluded that the number of students whose mathematical abilities were below the typical high school level had increased thirty-fold in the past five years.
“The SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it,” professors wrote in the letter. “Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.”
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2025 – A link between problematic social media use and mental health in Greece: Sex and generation differences
Our findings revealed a positive correlation between problematic social media use and anxiety, which was unaffected by sex or generation. Additionally, a positive link was found between problematic social media use and depression, with a stronger association observed in Generation Z and Millennials.
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2026 – The World Happiness Report, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, found that excessive use of social media negatively impacts personal wellbeing.
“If you use social media for an hour a day, that’s great, you’re being connected,” says Michael Plant, Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre. “But the report did show a correlation between, the more time you spend on social media the greater loss of wellbeing.”
Though the report does not know why the Western world is more impacted, it found that under 25s wellbeing in countries like United States, Canada, Australia and UK has dropped dramatically over the past decade – the same time social media has grown.
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2021 – Social media damages teenagers’ mental health, report says
Heavy social media use was linked to negative wellbeing and self-esteem, regardless of a young person’s mental state, with more girls experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness.
One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of primary school. The number of young people with probable mental illness has risen to one in six, up from one in nine in 2017.
Boys in the bottom set at primary school had lower self-esteem at 14 than their peers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55826238
https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/EPI-PT_Young-people%E2%80%99s-wellbeing_Jan2021.pdf
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2025 – Three in four teens have used AI companions, and half use them regularly.
A third of teens have chosen AI companions over humans for serious conversations, and a quarter have shared personal information with these platforms.
One third of teens surveyed say they have discussed serious matters with AI companions instead of real people at least once. About the same percentage describe AI chats as just as satisfying — or more satisfying — than talking to humans.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/20/nx-s1-5471268/teens-ai-friends-chat-risks
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2026 – Study finds that classical and jazz music have been decreasing in complexity
Jazz reached peak complexity in the 1950s – the era of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk – before steadily becoming simpler from the 1960s onward.
Complexity of classical music increased and decreased at various points before 1900. Compositions in the genre have become noticeably simpler during the 20th century.
The researchers point to some technological and cultural factors which may be at play in this shift from more complex to simpler music.
“Platforms like Spotify and YouTube not only offer listeners personalised recommendations but also act as hubs for discovering and promoting new artists, effectively functioning as the ‘new radio’ of the digital age,” they write.
“However, this interconnected landscape is not without its drawbacks. Previous studies have suggested that content circulating in fast, interconnected and algorithmically curated environments is subject to simplification processes, as seen in the case of song lyrics and social media comments. This raises an important question: is a similar trend occurring in the musical landscape?”
https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/9259/Think-pop-music-is-basic-Even-classical-and-jazz