The Artificial Intelligence-and-cognition debate is usually about what adults might lose, ignoring the question about its impact on what a developing mind might never build.
An adult arm immobilized in a cast loses strength, but once you free the arm and begin rehabilitation, most of it comes back. The capacity was built once, and the body remembers how to find it again. Now immobilize the limb of a newborn for several years, denying the formation of strength, coordination, and the neural pathways governing movement. This is not the same condition as the adult where strength can be regained or recovered, since the capacity was never formed. Rehabilitation has nothing to rehabilitate.
That difference, specifically between a capacity weakened and a capacity that never formed, is the one the AI-and-cognition debate keeps missing. I think it is the whole question.
Generally speaking, the worry about AI and the mind concerns subtraction. We talk about losing focus, losing memory, losing the patience to think a problem through. The neuroscience behind that worry is sound. The brain essentially runs on use, with connections strengthening when they are exercised and weakening when they are not, and a faculty you stop exercising will quietly decondition.
Earlier in 2026, an MIT Media Lab team wired up participants writing essays with an LLM, with a search engine, and with nothing at all, and watched brain connectivity scale down as it received outside help. The most aided members later struggled to quote work they had finished minutes before.
The researchers called the result cognitive debt. A separate study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon, surveying hundreds of knowledge workers, found that the more someone trusted the AI, the less critical thinking they reported bringing to the task. A review of seventeen studies found similar results that AI lifts performance on lower-order work and erodes it on the higher-order reasoning that gets offloaded. Unfortunately, both those findings measured competent adults (knowledge workers, university students) and the results of their deconditioning when their capacity went unused.
Judgment is a capacity that you can only build the “old fashioned way” so to speak, which is doing it. You learn to synthesize by struggling to synthesize. You learn to write by failing to write and trying again. You learn to reason through uncertainty by sitting inside the uncertainty long enough that something in you reorganizes around it. The friction is not the obstacle to the learning. The friction is the learning.
So the logical question to me is what happens when an unformed mind uses AI? I would speculate that this mind cannot synthesize an idea before ever learning to synthesize. I doubt it could render good judgments without having practiced judging. Unfortunately, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel demonstrated in experiments that a kitten deprived of normal input to one eye during a brief early window never develops normal vision in that eye, because the cortex wires around the deprivation and does not unwire later. Deprive an adult cat the same way and it recovers. The specific difference is that experience does not refine a circuit that already exists; it determines whether the circuit forms at all. The human version of that early visual deprivation is called amblyopia, which requires a similar treatment window before condition is permanent.
In full candor, while we know these windows exist for vision, hearing, and language, there is no long-term data that settles if they exist for higher-order capacities like synthesis and judgment. Regardless, I think it is completely logical and intuitive. Plus, in one sample, the preliminary results strongly suggest the youngest users leaned on these tools the most and scored the lowest on the thinking the tools displaced. The danger as mentioned earlier is that once missed, that capacity may never form and there is no rehab available. That asymmetry is why the formation question deserves more weight than the deconditioning one.
A good analogy of what AI can do to a mind is the scaffold or the cast. As a scaffold, AI can be a temporary support while a person builds the underlying capacity. As a cast, AI takes the load off entirely so output looks finished, but the developmental capacity was never formed.
I unintentionally ran the experiment for over fifteen years. My three sons played competitive chess, and the engines that can solve any position were available to all of them. The rule in our house was that you found the move yourself first, by sitting with the position, reasoning it through, and committing to a line. Only then could they check it against the engine. Most kids did the opposite, using the engine first to understand the position. I believe the order was everything as my sons not only excelled on the national and international chess scene, but were all early entrants into college.
So the practical question at this point is not whether to allow these tools. The “horse is already out of the barn” so to speak. That argument is over. The question is whether we can shape their use, and our children’s use, to keep the load on the human at the exact point a capacity is still forming. Get that right, and AI is the finest scaffold ever built. Get it wrong, and we will have cast a generation’s judgment before it ever bore its own weight and unlike a muscle, that is not the kind of thing that comes back.