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Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News
(news.berkeley.edu)
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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That’s not what ADHD is
News about LLMs gives people a false understanding about ADHD?
Their false understanding was likely there before they read the article.
Impossible.
It sounds like it's messing with the reward center of the brain which is what ADHD is all about.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, it's not something you can gain, it's a defect that happens from birth or during development. It's a physical difference in the brain.
You can simulate "ADHD brain" with drugs and conditioning, similar to how PTSD alters people's brain chemistry.
The human brain is plastic/adaptive and can change, depending on the cost/benefit of action/reward conditioning. Just like how people with ADHD can see some improvement with training, a neurotypical brain can see some ADHD-like changes with the same sort of (anti?) training. That's what I'm suggesting is happening in this AI study: People were rewarded for using the AI initially (dopamine response) but then that reward (easy way out) was taken away, and they performed more poorly as a result.
It stands to reason that their reward center was trained to behave like an ADHD brain in that it could tell there was not going to be an easy way to gain a reward from the activity, so it didn't bother putting in the necessary resources to achieve the outcome it would have accomplished if they were never given AI in the first place.
The usual dopamine response was overridden, thus behaving like an ADHD brain.
ADHD would be better described as “executive dysfunction”, essentially the issue is not that people with ADHD cannot pay attention, it’s that they have difficulty controlling where their attention is focused. People with ADHD are actually better at focusing than neurotypical people, they just can’t direct that focus, and it is captured by whatever the person with ADHD finds most interesting in a given moment.
ADHD does not negatively impact intelligence like AI use does, rather it impacts executive function.
If you gave these AI brainrot victims the medication commonly used to treat ADHD, it would not assuage the effects that the AI has had on their cognitive abilities.