This is an excerpt from the new book Unreachable: How Not to Lose Your Mind in an AI-Obsessed Era by Mohan Nair. Nair is a former healthcare entrepreneur; CEO of the advisory firm Emerge, Inc.; an Edmund Hillary Fellow; and the former Chief Innovation Officer of Cambia Health Solutions. He has also been a frequent contributor to InnoLead.
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Cocaine makes you believe that you are superhuman, even as it causes you to decay. It convinces you that more usage has exponential value. Are you caught in a similar delusion of productivity while experiencing cognitive atrophy from using Gen AI? Obsessing over AI is now evident in—but not yet fully infecting—our society. Consider the number of conferences, the funding principles in most venture capital funds, and the dinner table conversations about AI, and you clearly see a worldwide obsession over AI and its potential.
Before Gen AI, young people, who were forging ahead to explore the world and develop their own experiences, were acting on ideas originating from their minds. Today, many are first asking Gen AI for its opinion. What cognitive capabilities will be ill-formed as a result of the instantaneous use of this extended artificial brain?
The promise is clear. If you want to be a painter, writer, actor, script writer, or analyst, all you have to do is pay and prompt. Will we become accustomed to outsourcing our curiosity and cognitive capacity and abandoning the hard work that is designed to turn the raw mind and thoughts into meaning?
Facebook made us compare ourselves and boast. TikTok made us dance to others’ tunes. Gen AI has the potential to be the ultimate cognitive drug of choice. It can surround you with the world’s knowledge and offer you the opportunity to check with it before you even begin to think or design.
In the same way, what becomes of us after years of simply prompting for our solutions but never really learning? Many people are using Gen AI technologies to learn to think differently and do what they could never imagine doing without help. Some are being artistic while others are writing no code but creating algorithms. This is magical. We live a paradox of a great opportunity for some and possible cognitive decay for others. Generally, people react in two ways to Gen AI. One is what I call AI-afraid, and the second is AI-obsessed. Both will create unwanted side effects in the future. The third, which I propose as the better way to react to Gen AI, is learning how to be AI-enabled (Figure 1). This book discusses the foundations of each of these responses and its impacts. Of course, I want you to choose AI-enabled.
AI-Obsessed
AI-obsession is an overreliance on and indulgence in Gen AI. I know of users who rely on Gen AI for almost everything they question or are in doubt over. One person responds via text to blind dates using AI chatbots, placing all the text responses into the AI tech and asking for how to respond. I know of others who decide their day’s planning and even clothing based on AI. Then there are those who seek advice on divorce, dating, and even social issues. Of course, chatbots help when it comes to running meetings, being extroverted, or writing that carefully worded funeral message. But many ask chatbots to think for them before they think for themselves. It seems so much more convenient. Over time, three human tendencies can exaggerate our overreliance on AI and, possibly, cause cognitive decay or atrophy:
1. The curse of convenience
2. The temptation of good enough
3. The loss of the right to one’s own first opinion
The Curse of Convenience
Does Gen AI increase your cognitive capacity, or does it deprive you of the training you need for the future? Does the convenience of asking your chatbot what to make for dinner or how to decide on a trip itinerary overcome the concern that you may give up thinking?
Are you off-loading your important learning functions under the guise of convenience, and does this mean you will find yourself cognitively decayed later in your life? Or is Gen AI going to increase and enhance your cognitive self to levels yet to be understood or anticipated? When I am on panels at conferences, there is always one panelist who will look sideways at me and say, “We felt the same way about the calculator. We said it would kill our brains. It did not.” They are correct. But keyboard typing killed handwriting. Looking at screens killed human connections. So, what happens when Gen AI enters our minds?
A study done at the Swiss Business School’s Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability focused on the use of Gen AI tools and critical thinking. They also examined the impact of cognitive off-loading to AI tools on critical thinking. They found that higher Gen AI usage correlated with reduced critical thinking. As cognitive off-loading to Gen AI increased, critical thinking scores decreased. Of the more than six hundred respondents, the younger subjects displayed higher Gen AI usage, greater cognitive off-loading, and lower critical thinking scores. The study also noted a correlation between levels of education and off-loading. Here, the more educated, the less off-loading. This implies that the younger and lesser educated will off-load more and possibly experience cognitive atrophy.
We love convenience. But convenience, before we know what we are outsourcing, could dull our own mental skills. To use Gen AI well, do not allow yourself to take the easy road. Do not just ask Gen AI everything without learning from it. In the chapters that follow, I explain how inconvenient learning or trial and error actually builds your brain. This means that the convenience of over-using Gen AI dulls your brain in the long run.
The Temptation of Good Enough
As a musician, I used to be able to detect whether any music played was machine-generated or created by studio machines, and I refused to appreciate machine-generated music. Today, I’m bopping my head to drum machines and synthetic music with auto-tuned singers! What has changed in me? Remember Milli Vanilli, the breakout duo from the UK that was discovered to be lip syncing and did not write their own songs? Prior to the scandal, they received a Grammy award in the nineties. They sold about thirty million singles. The duo was a creation of manager Frank Farian, who found studio musicians to sing on the tracks while the duo toured worldwide just lip syncing. In July 1989, in an MTV performance, the hard drive malfunctioned, skipping through the song. But even after that, they performed, and the audience did not care. Only after individual backup singers objected did the false story crumble under the weight of the truth. The point of this story is not the crime—it’s that the audience did not care. The act was good enough.
Many of my colleagues are okay with computer-generated essays, poems, marketing analysis, or even machine-generated paintings. The general audience has lowered its need for originality, authenticity, or above-average work with the curse of good enough. And so have I. Many Gen AI-augmented posts, write-ups, and marketing plans are boringly the same—they revert to the mean. Until I realized that good enough was eroding my cognitive advantage, I accepted good enough. Now it is not enough. Set your standards above just good enough and reach for the extraordinary. Strive, and your brain will thrive.
We are now asking the machines for their first opinion, which leaves us to respond rather than create.
Losing Your First Opinion Rights
Are you becoming an editor of machine-generated ideas or the originator of your thoughts? We started with the assumption that Gen AI will help us by being our copilot or agent. We can produce more and exponentially scale ourselves. We now realize that Gen AI and GPT technology can offer imaginative ideas, draw for us, paint posters for us, and even write for us. We are now asking the machines for their first opinion, which leaves us to respond rather than create. In the past, the first opinion was always assigned to the owner of our creativity and cognition — our brains. Many Gen AI habitual users contend that they get more ideas to start their thinking using Gen AI. But when we become editors rather than creators, what happens to our cognitive originality? Where can we find lasting advantage as machines grow in computational strength and we weaken in our cognitive origination?
Many young people ask the machine for ideas to trigger their research papers or even their emails to each other. This weakens their ability as members of a human society to form the first opinion and take the cognitive energy to create original thoughts. When they start any project challenge, their first thought is to ask Gen AI to help launch their thinking. We should try to avoid using it to start thinking. If not, the Gen AI machines will drive our thinking, and they will generally bring us down to the mean or the average of what they know.
How to Be AI-Enabled
It would be ironic if all we have to do to be AI-enabled is to do the opposite of AI-obsessed behaviors. That would make a short book! Apart from decreasing your AI-obsessive tendencies, the research and my practical experiences and those of others point to three behaviors that are foundational to AI-enablement. The three ways to counteract obsessive AI impacts are listed next and shown in Figure 2:
1. Create the habit of experimentation.
2. Use Gen AI as your second opinion, not the first.
3. Reclaim your ability to gain insight, your aha!
In a sense, you are your own LLM filled with experiences, notions, instincts, and facts. Prompting yourself instead of the AI machine will train and retrain your cognition to be an active participant. The rest of this book discusses these concepts. But, to satisfy the insatiable curiosity for answers to this challenge, let me elaborate on the first and second items in the previous list.
First, keep trying and experimenting with anything difficult to solve. Keep trying until you get tired of failing. This is the exercise of your insightful mind. It loves to fail and try again, and every time you do, it is growing its cognitive strength. In a way, you must earn the right to get that aha. But to do that, experiments are good. Fearless failure is good.
…Just as we love someone to get the work done for us, we think we are expedient or even successful. We are neither. In fact, it’s a recipe for cognitive atrophy.
Second, the following research will show that starting with your opinion or ideas helps you remember, store, and act on those ideas better than if a machine provided the framework or the idea. Many of my colleagues love GPT because it gives them the first start to think through stuff. Well, just as we love someone to get the work done for us, we think we are expedient or even successful. We are neither. In fact, it’s a recipe for cognitive atrophy. So, start an endeavor with the struggle for your opinion first. This takes research, experience gathering, determination, repeated trials, and failures with no promise of a successful outcome. But what that does to your brain is miraculous. It builds its cognitive connections and mass. Idle minds that skip this step create unused capacity that, after some time, cannot return.
So skip the stage of asking your favorite GPT to start you off with ideas. Skip the open-ended prompt that asks the machine to guide when you have yet to think through a direction. I believe it’s more than okay to ask it to teach you as an expert on a topic so that you can understand, learn, and empower your ideas, but when you creep across that unseen line to asking it to tell you, then you are giving the rights to your own first opinion to a mindless machine that has been trained to respond based on the collective data it has been trained on.
I am proposing that there are three ways of not being obsessed with AI, and giving your own exploratory self away because of obsessive use of Gen AI can cause an atrophy in the number of insights (aha moments) you receive in the future. In a sense, you approach being data-obese and insight-starved. Here you know a lot of information, can find it fast, and explain it, but cannot see how your story weaves and guides these random pieces of information to form insight.
Why is Insight So Important?
Insight is the foundation of how innovators differ from intelligent machines. It is also how transformational innovators differ from those who seek incremental improvements or to maintain the status quo. Transformational insight is part of a family of “sights” that I call the sights of our mind. A subsequent chapter discusses these four sights of the mind. Can we produce insight when we want to? I say yes. But we must subdue our brain’s habit of consuming information in order to let our mind bloom. If not, we decay as we push more information into our brains while AI machines do our thinking for us. What I mean is that we need to train our minds to innovate and to be inspired by transformational insights.
Excerpted from the 2026 book Unreachable: How Not to Lose Your Mind in an AI-Obsessed Era, by Mohan Nair.
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