(NewsNation) — A new study led by researchers at MIT reveals that using OpenAI’s ChatGPT could be negatively impacting the brain’s critical thinking skills.

Researchers divided 54 students into three different groups and asked them to write essays using ChatGPT, Google’s search engine and nothing at all. Using electroencephalograms (EEGs), they recorded each participant’s brain activity and found that ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”

The study also revealed that over the course of the several months the study was conducted, the people who used ChatGPT put much less effort into the essays by just typing the prompt into the AI software and having it do all the work. ChatGPT users also retained less information from the essays that were written.

The effect was termed “cognitive debt” by researchers, highlighting how constant reliance on AI systems may impair the cognitive processes underlying independent thinking.

The brain-only group showed the highest neural connectivity in areas of the brain responsible for language comprehension, creativity and memory. The group that used Google had moderate brain engagement throughout the course of the study.