Bitamins

I wrote this short post for Mind Over Time, a new initiative by my friend Huibert Evekink , focused on helping people over 35 face the natural cognitive decline of aging through AI, keeping the mind curious, agile, and resilient in a world that moves far too fast for our biology.

We are living in uncertain times, as always happens at the dawn of a great technological revolution. Not too long ago, when calculators became popular, there were protests from academics who feared students would lose their logical thinking skills and eliminate cognitive effort altogether.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The use of calculators allowed us to focus on more complex tasks and explore new horizons, avoiding purely mechanical operations that a calculator—a machine with just a few bytes of RAM and less than 1MHz of speed—could handle.

To put things in perspective, the iPhone in your pocket or the one you’re reading this on has computational power about a billion times greater than that little machine that, in hindsight, helped us take giant leaps forward. It’s even far more powerful than the Cray-1, an exclusive supercomputer from the 1970s that occupied an entire room and cost millions of dollars.

Today, that revolutionary little machine is like a second brain, capable of answering virtually anything humanity has discovered throughout history. And more. Likely far more.

Just as those well-meaning but naive professors feared their students would lose cognitive effort by avoiding manual calculations—a concern that seems laughable to us now—many people today believe that AI will make us less skilled, more clumsy, and less capable. Following that logic, we might conclude that we are simply unaccustomed to it, and as time passes and AI becomes more integrated into our lives, we will grow used to it.

However, the comparison isn’t entirely fair. AI, contrary to what many believe, is not just a tool. In my humble opinion, I would describe it as a second brain, capable of supercharging your abilities and taking you to limits you could never have imagined. And, something that often goes unnoticed, it can serve as an assistant to rely on when your faculties begin to wane with age.

To delve into this topic, let’s briefly review how learning works and what happens as we age:

Learning is an active process: it requires capturing new information, processing it, and storing it in our memory for later application. Biologically, learning occurs when our neurons create new connections or strengthen existing ones, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. This process is extremely dynamic in our youth, when the brain is highly flexible and designed to absorb information as easily as a sponge.

As we age, neuroplasticity gradually decreases, though it doesn’t disappear entirely. We remain capable of adapting and learning, but it requires greater effort. This is where life experience comes into play—a key factor in helping us learn as we cross a certain age threshold. While we may not learn as quickly, we can connect new knowledge with concepts and scenarios we’ve already experienced, creating deeper learning and gaining a panoramic view of reality.

However, this process demands active effort.

Imagine you want to build strong arms worthy of a Greek sculpture. Lifting small, colorful dumbbells won’t result in any significant changes. Muscles need a sufficiently intense stimulus to force the development of new fibers or enlarge existing ones. Otherwise, I’m sorry to say, your time at the gym will have been wasted. Perhaps now you understand why in old school gyms, people followed routines that pushed them “to failure” and screams of effort echoed through the air.

It’s precisely at that point, when you consistently lift weights that challenge you day after day, week after week, and month after month, that your lazy biceps adapt to the environment you’ve created through effort and begin to grow.

The same thing happens with the brain. Meaningful learning occurs when we face tasks that require full attention, concentration, reflection, and problem-solving. This cannot be substituted. AI cannot undertake this process for you (at least not yet), just as it would be absurd to think that your gym partner could lift the weights for you and you’d see changes in your body when you looked in the mirror.

So, how can AI help us learn?

AI adds several interesting dimensions to the learning process. On the one hand, it offers immediacy—something we’ve already taken for granted in our daily lives. We live in an increasingly impatient society, where we expect answers and solutions instantly. In fact, we avoid the opposite—just think about how little patience you have when a website takes more than two seconds to load. AI meets that need but goes a step further: it not only satisfies our immediate curiosity but also forces us to think.

Every interaction with AI, every back-and-forth to refine a prompt or adjust an idea, compels us to reflect and search for new ways to articulate what we need—all within an environment that continuously “rewards” us with responses that get closer and closer to what we’re looking for. This ability to adapt to our needs, to provide small rewards with every satisfying answer, motivates us to dig deeper. Without realizing it, we’re achieving a smooth but constant cognitive effort.

This process is crucial as we age. We have a vast arsenal of experiences and have encountered countless situations that could benefit us in life, but we become slower at processing all that information. AI has the power to adjust, adapt, and display infinite patience. It acts as a facilitator of functional neuroplasticity, promoting neural connections by exposing the brain to personalized and adaptive challenges.

Ultimately, AI is not a substitute for our effort but a companion designed to support us in the cognitive challenges we face as we age. It helps us structure our ideas, process information faster, and make use of the vast reservoir of experiences we’ve accumulated, which may otherwise be slower to organize and activate. Its ability to adapt to both immediate and long-term needs, while providing continuous feedback, makes AI a powerful enabler of our learning and mental development.

AI can be the resource that keeps us active and curious, facing challenges tailored to our current capabilities. It doesn’t eliminate the effort but accompanies us, providing an environment that motivates, challenges, and gently leads us toward new learning. Used wisely, it can not only preserve our cognitive abilities but also open doors we thought were closed. A vitamin made of bits.