Sharon Sampson

Founder of @teamopenbook, helping mission-driven causes + companies invite people into their stories. I tweet ideas, faith, theater, + what surprises or amuses.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: MIT hooked people up to brain scanners while they used ChatGPT.

What they found should concern every single person reading this.

ChatGPT users showed 55% weaker brain connectivity than people who didn't use it. Not after years. After just four months.

Here's how they tested it. 54 people were split into three groups: one used ChatGPT to write essays, one used Google, and one used nothing but their own brain. They wore EEG monitors that tracked their brain activity in real time across four sessions over four months.

The brain-only group built the strongest, most widespread neural networks. Google users were in the middle. ChatGPT users had the weakest brains in the room. Every time.

Then the memory test hit. Participants were asked to recall what they'd just written minutes earlier. 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote a single line from their own essay. They wrote it. They couldn't remember it. The words passed through them like they were never there.

It gets worse. In the final session, ChatGPT users were told to write without AI. Their brains were measurably weaker than people who never used AI at all. 78% still couldn't recall their own writing. The damage didn't go away when the tool was removed.

Meanwhile, brain-only users who tried ChatGPT for the first time? Their brains lit up. They wrote better prompts. They retained more. Their brains were already strong enough to use AI as a tool instead of a crutch.

The researchers also found that every ChatGPT essay on the same topic looked almost identical. More facts, more dates, more names. But less original thinking. Everyone using ChatGPT produced the same generic output while believing it was their own.

MIT gave this a name: cognitive debt. Like financial debt, you borrow convenience now and pay with your thinking ability later. Except there's no way to pay it back.

The question isn't whether ChatGPT is useful. It's whether the price is your ability to think without it.

[Sharon Sampson @sharonsampson]

This is a great meditation on unlikely friendship.

“Her best gift of all was letting me into her life. In the closed-off silos of modern life, an open door to another’s life is an astonishment, a block of gold that should be mined for all it’s worth.” https://t.co/ntL92foKCO

[Bruce Terrell @bruce_terrell]

A final message from my dear friend and long-time colleague, @timkellernyc, to the congregants of the Redeemer family of churches in NYC.
https://t.co/Xs4OGriWPf

[Sharon Sampson @sharonsampson]

@KatelynBeaty I just shared a few stories in a Twitter thread of how he didn't retreat or exalt himself. He was "famous" and he was my client--but he operated in a posture of service. "Let me take the hit for that instead." A model we can learn from.

[Sharon Sampson @sharonsampson]

continue on still. And we get to be part of it. To learn from it. To grow through it. Isn't that wonderful?
I will miss him so. But thanks be to God for his story.

[Sharon Sampson @sharonsampson]

I first met Tim Keller as a "voice on a tape" when I was in college and given recordings of his sermons. A desire to attend his church is one of the reasons I moved to NYC in 2000. I started to fill notebooks I’m still filling with things I learned from Tim in Sunday services

[Sharon Sampson @sharonsampson]

the end. ... Of course, "the end" is not really the right phrase to close this thread. Both because Tim is only beginning the glorious next chapter in his relationship God. And also because the things God used Tim (and Kathy, whose influence cannot be overstated!) to say and do

[Gospel in Life @gospelinlife]

It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what your background is. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks. Your capital is the grace of God, not your children, not your bank account. – @timkellernyc

[Sharon Sampson @sharonsampson]

“The desire for gun control does not come from a place of wanting to take away something, but rather to save something else: fellow human beings…We are left with a question, which is: Whom do we love more, our guns or our children?” https://t.co/aqLLWJG0cF

[Sharon Sampson @sharonsampson]

@latondresse I met your mom during my time at Church of the Cross several years ago. She was lovely. Sincere sympathies for your family’s loss.