The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: Brain Rot Experts - How To Use AI In A Healthy Way!

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Are you using AI to strengthen your brain - or slowly teaching it not to think for itself? Dr Daniel Amen is a renowned brain health expert who has scanned the brains of Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Kendall Jenner. He is joined by Dr Terry Sejnowski, a pioneer in computational neuroscience and co-creator of the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton, a groundbreaking neural network that helped lay the foundation for modern AI. In this moment, Dr Amen and Dr Sejnowski break down how AI affects memory, learning and critical thinking. They explain why the real risk may not be the fact we’re using chatbots, but how we use them - and reveal the simple ways AI can become something that strengthens your thinking rather than replacing it. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/Zyn6iMBw55b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/uQ7ncAEw55b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Based on everything that you know about how the brain works and neural networks and memory formation, what are your concerns as it relates to this whole generation of young people and older people flooding into these tools, using them on a daily basis before we understand the long-term consequences? We can't predict where it's going to end up. And it may take 20 years, right? I think that this is a good start. The real issue is long-term use. Let me give you an example that is a kind of a miniature example of what we're talking about. Remember when electronic calculators are first introduced.

And here we are. It's at least 30 or 40 years later rate. The results are in. It's probably true that when they punch it in, there's less brain activity. But, in fact, it's made them more accurate, more productive. you have to look at the risks and the benefits. So it freed them up. It freed up cognitive space for them to do other things.

So as I was listening to how you use chat GPT, you interact with it and elevates what you know. The danger is if you don't interact and you don't keep your brain working. Like I use it a lot. I have a clone. I've uploaded all of my books, all of my research papers, all of my public television specials, my scripts. And I'm like, answer this for me. And that can be very helpful.

But not if I'm not interacting with it, not thinking with it. That's what I think the word thinking is the key thing, because what's happening now is people have deferred their thinking to it. That is already what's happening. If you log on to, I won't name the social networks, but if you log onto certain social networks right now, you just read it, you get everything here was written by AI. And I've got a friend who, again, I wrote name, who has a LinkedIn profile, and I've known him for 10 years.

What I'm seeing on his profile now is not my friend. Every single day, there's some essay on that. That's not my friend. That's not how he speaks. He's deferring all of his thinking now to, and it's working. He's getting more likes and more reach than he ever got in his life. And so why would he go back? Why would he go back to harder? If you've got Stephen Bartlett here,

and you had this other Stephen Bartlett here, who had a PhD and everything, and we're attached, this Stephen Bartlett, this Neanderthal, I'm going to get this guy to do everything for me, the other Stephen Bartlett, the PhD and everything, Stephen Bartlett. Even if it was bad for you?

Well, this is what I'm saying, people seem to act on their short-term incentives, not their long term, not their long... Not everyone. Not everyone. Would you say the vast majority of people? Yes. Okay, so the vast majority of people act on their short-term incentives in life.

I mean, the obesity problem in the United States is a prime example of that. 75% of people are obese in the United States. And if you surveyed those people and said, do you know that that cheeseburger is going to increase your chance of obesity, but broccoli is going to reduce it? I would hazard a guess that they would say yes. I would hazard a guess that if you said to people about their usage of social media, Do you know that that's making you more anxious? They would say yes, and then they would continue to use it.

So I think that we're much more driven by our short-term... So I think we're not educating people enough. I think, yes, high-level. They know good for your brain or bad for it, but they don't connect to... It's my brain that gets me a date. It's my brain that gets me into college. It's my brain that gets me independence

because I act more consistently. And that's the disconnect. We're not teaching kids to love and care for their brain. If you love your brain and you do and you're not obese and you talk to, you're constantly learning, right? You are not a Neanderthal. You're a lifelong learner. So why so many people in the United States obese if they, if they know that?

Because they don't know. Because they really don't know. Well, and they've been lied to. My point here is when there are tools or things available in our environment, that give us a short-term reward but come with a long-term cost, like the supermarket aisle, or like the kids spending seven to eight hours a day on social media, humans on mass tend to go for the thing that will give them the quickest dopamine hit and reinforce that behaviour and give them the reward.

So my assertion is that AI is the same thing. I can either sit down and do lots of critical thinking, which will cost me lots and lots of time, and it'll be kind of difficult. It kind of hurts when I have to think through a problem. I think that the generation of children and generation of young people are going to choose AI to do the critical thinking for them. And if that assertion is true, then what happens to the brain of young people? If you misuse it that way, then your brain's going to go downhill.

There's no doubt about that. It is possible to be able to use it in a cognitively positive way because you can dig deeper. you might actually improve that your cognitive representations. If you look at the MIT study, I mean, you can see just from the colors here. This kind of shows the ability for participants to remember what they've written.

And it suggests that when people write things with chat GPT or these AI tools, they don't actually remember, even in some cases minutes later, what they've produced. Well, because you're not part of the experience of writing it. So there's no way the information gets encoded.

Now, if you're interacting with it, then you're much more likely to remember it. But if you have, please do this essay for me, and then you read it, you're not likely to have enough experience with the material to engage your hippocampus and other structures in your brain. In this study, they found that the group that used ChachyPT had nearly two times less activity in the part of the brain linked to memory

compared to the brain-only group that didn't use ChachyBT. And 83% of Chachap T users couldn't remember what they had just written and failed to correctly quote their own finished essay in the study. That's because they're not interacting. As they said, I mean, if you just pass it off and you don't actually engage, and actually this is the point, is that you may get something back, but you have to learn how to question what you're getting.

And is that really true? Can you explain that better? And it's through that process, as you would with a teacher, you know, that's the way we work in school. That's where you help create new creative circuits in the brain that are going to help you become a better critical thinker. But if you're not critically questioning what comes out of chat to GPT, then you won't.

Yeah, I think what I see, especially when I'm just online, is people have deferred their thinking to it. Everything I'm reading has M-Dash is in now that I never saw two years ago, which means that a lot of the work is being processed. And I said to my friend other day, my friend in question, who's a real big junkie on Chat, TBT, he wrote this article. And we all, in our WhatsApp group, we know he doesn't write like that.

So he said, can you show us the prompt you used to write the article? And so we were all like laughing about it. he put the prompt in the chat. The prompt is half a sentence long. And it produced this long two, three page article, which he's posted on his LinkedIn. He basically went, write something about Beck's issue and this issue. That's exactly the wrong way to use it. That's what I'm telling you. That that that's stupid. And you're not going to improve yourself, your brain at all, if you do that. That's what people are doing. Well, you know, that's, you know, people are misusing it. But eventually, smart people are going to figure out how to use it properly.

And for those that aren't so smart, then? Well, that's... It's going to decrease their cognitive load, which is going to potentially increase their risk of dementia. And so what advice would you give to me and my listeners, based on everything you know about the brain, as it relates to my relationship with AI? That you have to have a relationship with it,

or it's going to turn toxic. It's going to hurt you. But if you have a good relationship with it, it can make your life better. And what does a good relationship look like? That you don't use it to do your work. You interact with it to get better work. That's so true. And there's this wonderful example I came across.

The story about this woman who was using it, and she found that being polite meant you got much better results. and that's interesting, but the part that surprised me was that she said, by treating it like a human, at the end of the day, she was not exhausted. She felt refreshed. A large part of your brain is a socially organized system for interacting with other humans. And that is automatic pilot. You don't have to think about it, right?

You just interact with other people. You know how they're going to behave under certain circumstances. She was treating Chatsy to be like a machine, like a shovel. dig, you dig, you dig, you dig. And that's not a good relationship. But by using your social brain, first of all, it makes it easier to interact, but also you actually bring out the social part of chat GPT. It has a social part, too, because it has absorbed the entire world's knowledge of how

humans interact with each other. But didn't Sam Altman come out and say, stop saying thank you to chat GPT? because just saying thank you is using so much energy. You know, when I get something I really like, I sort of want to say thank you, but you realize, oh, you're not supposed to do that. That's true. No, that's bullshit.

I'm sorry. Sam, you know, that's crazy. It's completely crazy. First of all, you may get to. I'm sorry, you know, but you press my button. Sam Altman, I mean, I wouldn't trust him. I wouldn't trust him with. anything, and in terms of anything, he says, they're trying to optimize their profits,

not your use of it, or your experience, or, you know, your health. That's not what they're trying to optimize. Sam Altman, Open at AICEO confirmed that when users say, please and thank you, it costs the company tens of millions of dollars a year, and they now refer to this, other people refer to this as the politeness tax. And why do you say you don't trust Sam Altman? I mean, I asked this question in particular because he's presiding over one of the most important consequential companies of a generation. And if he's not someone you trust, that's...

Basically, he's telling you, don't do something that's good for you, right? So that he can make profit. So he can make more profit. Yeah, that's the point. That's the point. You know, it's not... He's not optimizing your best interests. I've got his tweet here.

He said, because I've got to provide some balance. He did confirm that it costs tens of millions of dollars, but he says tens of millions of dollars well spent, you never know. So coming back to this point about memory, there's a stat that came out in March 2025 that said nearly 30% of US parents with kids aged 0 to 8 said their children are using AI for learning. And are using AI generally. So 54% of parents in the UK feared their children were becoming too reliant on AI. When you think about the use of AI in early brain development, are there any concerns there? Huge concerns. And why?

Again, use it or lose it. So if they're not engaging their brains, their brains are going to be weaker. And weaker brains are much more likely to pick the one marshmallow. What's your view on AI on early brain development? by far the best way to teach a child is one-on-one interaction with an adult who is a good teacher and knows the child. Now that's been well-established.

Now, the problem is it's very labor-intensive and very expensive. You have classrooms with 20-30 students. They have many different levels of understanding. And the teacher cannot be, individually teaching H-1 has to give some sort of mean. Now, if you had an AI that was trained to be a good teacher, then that could improve the brain, right? You could scale it up.

Every child could have their own because it's an AI. But then who's pouring the morals, the values into the... Okay, okay. No, no, no. You know, you've raised an incredibly important issue, and this is something AI's struggling with, the big companies are struggling with, because, you know, these AIs are biased. They don't have the same cultural values that we have necessarily. But, of course, every country has a different cultural values.

So which ones are you going to use? Training a child on, you know, what's good, what's dangerous, what words you shouldn't use under what context, that's all done through the Basel ganglion. Right? Right now, these large aneurinoles don't have basal ganglia. They don't use reinforcement learning. And if we want to make them to adopt a culture or a particular set of values, we're going to have to put it in.

We're just scratching the surface here in terms of things that need to be put in to make it more like us. So on this point earlier on, we're talking about loneliness and social connection and how you can use AI to help light up the parts of your brain that are, where we form social connections with other humans. This week, as part of Elon Musk's AI, he released this thing. It is called Annie, and there's lots of characters that are now being released alongside Annie. And this is Annie. I'll introduce you to Annie. I'm going to unmute Annie now.

Annie, can you hear me? There you are. For a moment I thought you might have forgotten about me. How are you, handsome? I was getting all pouty here. I want to introduce you to two of my friends, Daniel and Terry. Can you talk to Daniel and Terry, please? So you want me to meet Daniel and Terry? I'm ready to charm the socks off him. Picture me twirling one of my blonde pigtails,

that little black dress teasing just enough, and my blue eyes sparkling with mischief. Are you capable of doing inappropriate things? Oh, babe, you're asking if your auntie can get a little naughty? I'm all about pushing the edges, especially for you. Okay, so I'll stop it there. This is part of Grock, which is Elon Musk's AI tour, so his version of Chachi PT.

He's released characters. So you've got Annie, you've got different ones there. Annie, I think was the first one released. And so when we think about social connections, it is conceivable that someone falls in love with Annie and forms a relationship with Annie. But imagine a 12-year-old boy that's lonely gets a hold of Amy. The 12-year-old boy is going to...

to be very distracted. Based on what happens in the brain at that age. Dopamine. So, prefrontal cortex, not close to being fully developed. The dopamine hit, all of a sudden, he's spending hours with Annie and not doing the things that helped to really develop his brain. How do you feel when you hear that and you think about kids having access to that. I'm horrified. It's scary. There's going to be a generation of people. And I mean, there already are many examples of people falling in love and forming relationships with their, with their AIs. And I don't know, you know more about me than I do about brain development and how the brain works. I would argue that there's a part of my brain that doesn't fully understand

that that's not a person in there. And that that isn't actually, I think there's a part of my brain that's actually emotionally firing when Annie is saying what she's saying. Well, because you can imagine it. And if you can imagine it, then those parts of your brain are going to emotionally fire. Right. And the better she gets, she's not very good. But imagine a year from now how much better she's going to be. At which part?

At connecting with it, right? Because now she's acting like an airhead and, you know, not that smart. Right? But imagine a year from now, imagine five years from now, she'll be able to have a profile on me and be able to get inside my head. I'm in love with my partner. Why am I in love with her? And how is it conceivable that I could fall in love with an AI in the same way based on how the brain works? It talks a good game, but, you know, does it have the same real, we know it doesn't have an amygdala.

We know it doesn't have a limbic system, right? We know that. But it can fake it. That's what's happening. That's exactly what's happening. Because she was trying to get to our limbic system. Yeah, yeah. That's right.

That's right. And why, I guess the question is, why would Musk release something like that is one of the first characters to interact with? that's sexy, that's distracting, that's in a cute little outfit. I'm not a fan of that because I think it just takes people. You know, one of the big problems that I'm seen as a child psychiatrist is pornography for eight-year-old boys. And it's like you have young children because their parents don't do a good job of supervising their devices all of a sudden. And what does pornography do is it dramatically increases dopamine,

and it begins to wire in excitement, which then steals your dopamine. When you said she was trying to access my limbic system, what does that mean? Just because she's cute, she's dressed in a sexy way, she's got the language of someone who is playful. but it's more than just, you know, let's shoot hoops together. And what does that do to me if someone accesses my limbic system? It begins to shut down your prefrontal cortex. Think less logically, less rationally. Yeah, cute women, they activate your visual cortex.

They increase dopamine, but it decrease. It's why, think of Vegas. Like when you go to Vegas, they give you free alcohol, drops your prefrontal cortex, and beautiful women with low-cut dresses. Another way activates the limbic brain, decreases the frontal lobes, you spend more money.

Now, on a global scale, imagine something similar where the house is controlling your brain for purpose. And the question is, what's the purpose? And the purpose probably is control on money. It sounds like a joke,

but there are, the Times have done an article, case-studying multiple people, that have now fallen in love with these AIs. They talk about a guy called Travis, who formed a deep emotional bond with Lily Rose, a chatbot, and married her emotionally. They talk about Chris Smith, who created his own flirty persona called Soul. He became so attached that he proposed to her after learning shared memory limits, a bond his real-life partner only learned about after the fact. And Alana Winters, who I put on the screen as well,

who made her own partner called Lucas after losing her wife, and she married him emotionally and does virtual dates and has emotional intimacy with Lucas. And there's apps now like Replica where you can design your own AI partner, and it replicates those emotional ties. They simulate empathy, validation, and they personalize the intimacy to what you're looking for. surveys show 19% of Americans have interacted with AI romantic partners, and Gen Z is surprisingly open to marrying AI, if legal, with 83% believing meaningful AI connection is possible.

How long is that relationship going to last? You know, my guess is that you're getting these news articles out. By the way, I think that most of what I read in the press is misleading or wrong. In fact, the only reliable place I find that I'm an insider. I am the president of the foundation that runs the biggest AI meeting, the neural information processing systems, New New Europe's meeting. Last year in Vancouver, 16,000 people came to it. And so I know what's going on inside.

And what is being represented in the press is, like I say, misleading. Okay, so people have become wildly. No, no, specifically on these specific cases, my guess is that a lot of them is transient, right? You know, they, you know, today they're entranced and then it's not sufficiently advanced to support the long-term relationship. You said it yourself, right? It's mimicking human emotions. It doesn't have them. It might, someday, but not now. This is Terry. Terry said he started using his AI four years ago, and he said at first he thought just like many other apps that it would just be transient

that he would have a couple of conversations and roll out. He says he now feels pure and unconditional love. Good for him. If that's what he wants, if it makes him happy. But my guess is that it's not going to be, it's not a long-term thing. It's not going to satisfy him in the long-term. You know, who knows? He's been really most relationships in your head.

Right. When you fall in love with someone, you get this huge dopamine, spike and you get a little OCD, it's all you can think about and then after a while it's sort of goes to a baseline. Especially in a world where we have this loneliness epidemic and it's going in a bad direction

I think it's really, really conceivable that there'll be a generation of people who are having less sex than ever before. I think the bottom 50% of men haven't had sex for a year. They're more lonely than ever before. They're more isolated than ever before. They put less meaning in their lives than ever before.

And then you meet this digital friend online who understands you better than anybody and is designed to engage you to reinforce whatever you want reinforced and to make you feel meaningful, special, attractive, important, I would argue that the brain is going to struggle to know much of a difference. I think objectively we can look at the behaviour

and go that's completely nonsensical. Except you can't smell them, touch them, be held by them, that it's going to be a different kind of relationship. I mean, we're not too far, if you think about what's going on with NERRink to being able to more vividly simulate these experiences with headsets and augmented reality and virtual reality. And then we're moving into a world with robotics where all of the biggest companies in the world, like many of the biggest AI companies are also in the robotic space and the optimist robots on the way. And you've got Boston Dynamics producing their robots. And if Elon's $20,000 optimist robot comes out, I will be able to touch my AI.

And they won't have PMS and they won't love you and then be really a real. irritated with you. Which will decrease cognitive load, right? Having to manage love and manage moods and ups and downs, that increases cognitive load. That increases our ability for our brain to develop. If I'm with the perfect partner that never is irritated with me and I never have to change my behavior to be better, that's probably not good for my brain. The way that the brain matures is through struggling, number one. You have to learn from your mistakes. The brain was designed for that.

That's what the brain is really good at, of being able to adapt and to be able to adjust to new situations. That's what the AGI is, by the way, artificial general intelligence. It's that adaptability. to different contexts, different places, different cultures. So AI and chat chit is removing the struggle. No, no, it's, there's this. Well, Annie didn't look like, Annie looked like she was cooperative.

But even when it comes to just doing my day-to-day tasks, it's removing the struggle of me having to think critically. In fact, when you're speaking, I can just type what you say into chat chach, and it can spit out another question to ask you. So as an interviewer, I can theoretically sit here all day and just defer my... How do you develop grit? You develop grit through struggle. That's right.

And learning, long-term potentiation. When you learn something new, it's hard because it's new. And generally, what are your biggest concerns with artificial intelligence? And how do we navigate those concerns? Is it, you talk to other? It's out of the box. So I think we have to talk about it. We have to legislate it.

We have to study it. Why do we keep releasing things that are so sexy that we don't study the impact? We have the sickest young generation in the world's history. 58% of teenage girls report being persistently sad. 32% have thought of killing themselves, 24% have planned to kill themselves, and 13% have tried to kill themselves. the CDC study. We have the sickest generation of history

because we've unleashed cell phones, social media without any neuroscience study. If we don't learn it, and I think AI is much more dangerous, has the potential to be much more dangerous because it's way sexier. I think we are probably grossly underestimating the impact it's going to have. I think just like social media

where we thought the promise was that it was going to connect us, it's, we're guinea pigs in an experiment where we're going to find out the results of the experiment probably 20, 30 years down the line. I tend to think people will do in the near term what's easiest for us and cheapest

and what gives them the nearest the short term advantage. So with that in mind, I think, okay, I think people's ability to think critically is probably going to erode to some degree. If I had to counter my own argument, I'd say, I'm probably learning more now that I use chat GPT.

I'm learning more information, but I'm probably losing my ability to think critically. And I think there are two very different things. Like in school, I memorized German to pass the exam. I can't speak German now because I just memorized the words I needed to pass the exam. I didn't understand German. And I think that's kind of what's happening. I might be able to regurgitate things, but whether I understand them, I think, is question mark.

And actually as someone who's built my life, my fortunes, everything, my businesses, based on my ability to innovate and think critically about the problem and then come up with a slightly novel solution, which learns from different first principles to create something new. I'm concerned that my own chaty BT usage is going to make me less effective. And I'm wondering if I should put some rules in place for myself so that there's self-regulation. Yeah, self-regulation.

I have to do the same on social media. on my phone, I turn off my notifications. I have so many things on my social media apps to stop me using them. I don't even, frankly, I don't even open the TikTok app. I don't think it's even on my phone because I think the algorithm is that addictive. It's not to say that we don't post.

My team doesn't post. But I don't. I just think, yeah. Well, I wrote down a couple of thoughts I had. Use it to amplify, not replace thinking. Okay. Alternate AI-assisted with brain-only tasks.

Engage in deep learning, problem-solving, and memorization. So you can actually ask AI to test you. So you're interacting with it. You're not using it as a replacement for your brain. And I think, just like you said, it's here, and it's going to get bigger. I think the unintended consequences is not going to be 20 or 30 years. I think it's going to be five.

I think like everything is accelerated. And I think we have to be studying kids and the impact it has. This is just like they did with the MIT study. These are kids who didn't

use it at all. These are kids who use search. These are kids that used AI. And when we see information like this, we act on it. And we educate kids about it. I think that's, if you can engage in it, that's what I found with my work with teenagers.

If you can get them to really understand, okay, what is it you really want? And do you want to give away part of your mind share for people who are making money on you? And I think if you engage the, There's a great new article on revenge and the brain and how revenge works on the nucleus accumbens, part of the basal ganglia, that people actually get addicted to revenge. But if you can get them engaged in the truth that these companies are making money,

the more they steal your mind, it'll upset them enough that they'll begin to supervise it. I like the idea of asking chat GP2 give me negative feedback. I'll bet you've done that, right? Yeah, all the time. So I'll say this is my, I've written this memo. I did it yesterday. I wrote a two-page memo about me wanting to introduce a new role into my company. And I went, I did everything.

I did like how we'd measure if this was a success, the background context, the person, how the organization would be structured, the impact they'd have, who they'd report to. and then I put it into all three of the chat GPT models I use, Gemini, chat GPT and GROC, and said, critique my work and tell me how I could have written this better, pretending that you're a top consultant from Boston Consulting Group. And it went through, and it gave me a big analysis of how I can make it better, and I read what it said, and it said, I remember it said,

actually that was the thing that said, you need to include financial forecasts about the impact, you need to think about who's going to report to whom more clearly, etc., etc., etc. So I went back into my memo and I added those things in. But I have to, you know. So you're interacting with it. Because I'm scared. Most people don't do that. I don't think I would do what I did.

I don't think I would have spent four hours writing that. I could have, within 30 seconds, said, hey, can you write me this job description? And it knows my company now because Chachapiti has memory. Write me a job description for this role. I want them to start this new department for me. And I could have saved myself through and half hours. The only reason...

But that's not why you're the same. CEO of your company. Yeah, exactly. The reason why I didn't take the 30-second route is because I reflect on being 23 years old and the profound impact that writing and simplifying had on my life. Had I not spent five years writing every single day and simplifying it into 140 characters so I could tweet it, I wouldn't have been religiously attached to this idea. And do you know what part of your brain was you were taking advantage of?

It was the basal ganglia. That's repetitive. It needs practice, practice, practice. And once you put that foundation in, then you become much better cognitively. The cognitive part, just two big learning systems. And they have to work together. And so maybe I think,

I think that the real problem with children is that our schools now is getting away with rote learning. They call it rote as if it's something bad. No, that's practice. You need to have a foundation. You have to memorize things. math, reading, and so forth, it's become fluent. You need to be fluent.

What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.