How to stay smart in the age of AI: the science of critical thinking
NEWS FEATURE 23 September 2026 How to stay smart in the age of AI: the science of critical thinking There is growing concern that AI can blunt memory and reasoning. But science shows ways to keep the brain sharp. In a 2025 survey of more than 1,000 US faculty members, conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 90% said they thought that generative AI will reduce students’ critical-thinking skills.
- ▪NEWS FEATURE 23 September 2026 How to stay smart in the age of AI: the science of critical thinking There is growing concern that AI can blunt memory and reasoning.
- ▪But science shows ways to keep the brain sharp.
- ▪In a 2025 survey of more than 1,000 US faculty members, conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 90% said they thought that generative AI will reduce students’ critical-thinking skills.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,359 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Nature |
| Canonical URL | https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02930-6 |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:53:23 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T19:55:26.336Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T19:55:26.336Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | eP2K4c7yUgPM · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
NEWS FEATURE 23 September 2026 How to stay smart in the age of AI: the science of critical thinking There is growing concern that AI can blunt memory and reasoning. But science shows ways to keep the brain sharp. By Helen Pearson Helen Pearson View author publications Search author on: PubMed Google Scholar Email Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Whatsapp X Save article View saved research Illustration by Paweł Jońca Earlier this year, education researcher Lixiang Yan realized that students could outsource all of their work for his university course to artificial intelligence.In praise of human teachers: universities must resist outsourcing everything to AIYan, who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, was using an agentic AI called Codex to set up an online course on a…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Nature.
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