Is AI Frying Human Brains?

1. Is AI Frying Human Brains? 

Brain rot. Deskilling. Dopamine hijacking. Workslop.  

AI, for all its faults, has unleashed a colorful wave of workplace metaphors. Here’s a newer one: brain fry. This idea – which might be the most persuasive – posits a counterintuitive premise: in the workplace, AI is taxing the human brain more, not less. Carl Hendrick, a learning specialist, argues we’re suffering brain fry because: 

AI-generated content masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. The particular cruelty of workslop is that it doesn’t announce its own inadequacy; it arrives fluent, confident, and formatted, offloading the cognitive labour of detecting its failures entirely onto the recipient. In other words, the person who did the least thinking ends up doing the least work, and the person who receives it ends up doing the most. 

2. Is AI Saving Human Brains? 

Forget brain fry. What about the AI tools that are accelerating the diagnosis and research for Alzheimer’s? According to a recent post by Bill Gates, Alzheimer’s research is entering “a golden age.” And Gates contends that AI is a big part of the reason why: 

There’s a lot of very cool work being done to diagnose Alzheimer’s by using AI to detect changes in how you speak. I’m particularly excited about how AI’s ability to find meaning in large amounts of data will make research go a lot faster… AI is also helping scientists write their own code, so they’re able to run regression analyses on their own and test more hypotheses more quickly. Many researchers don’t have access to a biostatistician or a data scientist to help them with this. Now, more people can code on their own, and the stats experts are able to focus their time on supporting the most promising hypotheses. 

3. Beware Brain Hyperbole

Gary Schwitzer, a veteran healthcare journalist, warns of the dangers of overstating claims in health and medicine. “Saving” and “frying” human brains would likely attract his ire. But Schwitzer’s latest post overlooks the humble HLG Pharma Notebook and sets its sights on The New York Times article, “6 Common Medications That May Lower Your Dementia Risk”:   

Whenever you read or hear a health care story that uses words like “may…might…could,” feel free to substitute the words “may not…might not” because at this point in the research you would be making an equally plausible projection…The NYT article expressed “excitement” (that word was used twice) for the flu vaccine, the shingles vaccine, statins and blood pressure drugs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and diabetes drugs (metformin and SGLT2 inhibitors). It is my opinion that it is not journalism’s job to pump up excitement about as-yet unproven claims. Ask yourself when you read this: Who is excited? How does the journalist know that x number of people are excited? Are there any conflicts of interest behind this excitement? 

4. Publish and Perish

The Transmitter, a website of neuroscience news, offers a compelling case to retire the traditional peer-reviewed scientific paper. Save the eulogies. The benefits for neuroscience would be many: 

The OpenEval team argues that scientific publication should distinguish between two functions that papers currently bundle together: the dissemination of results and the communication of ideas. Results, they say, should be published in explicit, machine-readable form. Narratives should serve as an interpretive layer on top of that structured foundation. The paper would still exist, but it would become one view of a deeper, queryable record. 

Neuroscience may have more to gain from this kind of system than most fields. The discipline spans molecular biology to functional imaging to behavioral psychology, and findings at one level routinely bear on questions at another—yet the connections stay buried because no single person can manage the flood of findings from all subfields. A structured, queryable record of results would make those connections visible for the first time.  

5. Chinese Brain Chips 

A Chinese startup has beaten Neurolink to market. Its “coin-sized implant that sits on…the brain’s protective outer membrane” helps patients regain movement following spinal cord injuries. The implant’s path to approval tells a bigger story about the Chinese regulatory environment: 

The approval process was accelerated by the less invasive design and by China’s strategic prioritisation of BCI technology as a national innovation frontier…The NMPA’s decision to assign a national health insurance code within days signals that Beijing views BCI technology as core healthcare infrastructure, not just an experimental luxury. Here is the thing. The race to commercialise brain-computer interfaces was widely assumed to be a Silicon Valley story, driven by Neuralink’s global media profile. China winning that race with a university-startup partnership is one of the most significant technology upsets of 2026.  

Alex Tabarrok, a veteran FDA watcher, notes how the FDA is – insufficiently – responding to pressure by Chinese biotech.