What Happens to the Human Mind When Technology Removes Cognitive Effort?

The belief I never questioned

Some ideas can become so deeply embedded in the way you think that you stop noticing they are assumptions at all.

One of mine was the idea that human beings need to exert meaningful effort in order to achieve fulfilment. If something comes easily then it will not satiate that desire for meaning and purpose that so many of us crave.

The more I listened to conversations between neuroscientists, psychologists, entrepreneurs and evolutionary biologists, the more this idea appeared to underpin almost everything else. It sounded so convincing that I never stopped to question the idea in the first place.

Which left me wondering about something else. If effort is genuinely essential to human flourishing, why has the history of civilisation been a story of removing it?

Almost every important technological advance has done exactly that. We removed physical labour, mental arithmetic, manual navigation, and now we’re beginning to remove parts of thinking itself.

In order to get a clear understanding of this question I started looking at it through a few different lenses.

Evolutionary Psychology - Struggle & survival

The lens that immediately resonated with me and that I just assumed was true is evolutionary psychology.

At its core the idea is that the human mind wasn’t designed from scratch. It was shaped over hundreds of thousands of years by the problems our ancestors repeatedly had to solve. Finding food. Building shelter. Forming relationships. Raising children. Cooperating with others while competing for limited resources.

According to this view, many of our motivations, emotions and behavioural tendencies didn’t appear by accident. They evolved because, at some point in our evolutionary history, they helped our ancestors survive and reproduce.

If that’s true, then effort isn’t just an inconvenience to minimise. But may be an environment our minds expect to operate in.

One of the reasons I’ve found this framework so persuasive is that it seems to explain a huge range of human behaviour. It becomes easier to understand why effort and meaning often seem to travel together.

Evolutionary psychology doesn’t claim that meaning itself evolved or that we ought to seek struggle. Its primary aim is to explain why certain psychological tendencies may have developed over time.

But most people who talk about it draw a broader conclusion. If our motivational systems evolved in a world that demanded constant problem-solving, perhaps it’s no coincidence that we often find our deepest satisfaction in doing difficult things.

In that sense it helps to explain why hard to overcome challenges often feel meaningful. Why boredom can become psychologically painful. Why people voluntarily seek challenges despite having easier alternatives and why prosperity doesn’t always lead to fulfilment.

Looking back at my own life, it’s certainly tempting to see it that way. Living abroad and learning foreign languages was not always enjoyable in the moment. Writing online can feel, at times, incredibly frustrating and hopeless, and building an audience is full of uncertainty and delayed gratification.

Progress is slow, setbacks are frequent and the rewards are delayed. Yet reaching the other side often brings a deeper sense of satisfaction than anything that came effortlessly. And yet a few questions keep nagging at me. How much of this is an evolutionary adaptation? How much is cultural?

If struggle is essential, why do so many contemplative traditions place such emphasis on peace rather than striving? And perhaps the biggest question of all – Are we confusing effort itself with something more fundamental?

2. Humans don’t need suffering. But they do need challenge.

As persuasive as I find the evolutionary argument, there is one thing that doesn’t sit quite right with me.

If our minds evolved to solve difficult problems, does that mean more difficulty is always better? Is the constant drive to achieve and the inability to just sit down and relax a sign of “being human” or perhaps a sign of unresolved psychological tensions?

The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is, in my opinion, the best account of optimal learning that I have found. He spent decades studying what he called flow — those moments when you’re so completely absorbed in an activity that time seems to disappear. It can be found in every domain of life. In athletes, musicians, programmers, writers, artists, entrepreneurs - all described experiencing the flow state.

His conclusion wasn’t that humans need hardship or constant struggle. But that we seem to do our best work when the challenge is just beyond our current ability.

Too little challenge and the mind wanders. Too much challenge and it retreats.

That feels like a subtle but important refinement of the evolutionary perspective. It helps us to move beyond mere survival and into the higher realm of meaning, purpose and progress.

That’s certainly how my experience of learning German felt. It’s also a similar story whenever I sit down to write. Every essay begins with an idea that feels frustratingly vague. I know there’s something there, but I can’t quite articulate it. The next few hours can be highly frustrating, and yet when the challenge is at the right level, I become completely absorbed by it. Hours can go by unnoticed. It’s one of the reasons I find writing, and just language itself, so engaging.

We’re constantly told that optimising the brain means taking the right supplements, following the right morning routine or using the latest productivity system. Yet one of the most cognitively demanding things a person can do is to think. In my experience thinking on the page or in another language will do more for your brain than any morning routine or supplement ever will.

Learning a language forces you to remember, predict, improvise, tolerate uncertainty and constantly make mistakes in front of other people. It stretches memory, attention and social cognition all at the same time. In many ways, it seems almost perfectly designed to keep the mind engaged.

Which raises another question.

If what our brains really need isn’t suffering but appropriately difficult engagement, what happens when technology begins removing not just repetitive work, but the very cognitive challenges that keep us mentally alive?

3. What happens when cognitive effort becomes optional?

If the first two perspectives are broadly correct, then they both point towards an uncomfortable possibility.

It would appear that cognitive effort isn’t simply the price we pay for learning. It’s the actual mechanism through which learning takes place.

For most of human history, the environment demanded certain cognitive abilities from us. If you wanted to navigate across unfamiliar countryside, you had to learn how to read a map.

If you wanted to remember information, there was no alternative but to commit it to memory. The environment forced the mind to adapt.

Technology has gradually removed many of those demands, and in doing so it has made life unquestionably better. Progress has always been about reducing unnecessary effort. But every time we remove one form of cognitive effort, I can’t help wondering what happens to the cognitive ability that effort was developing.

Most people can no longer do complicated (or even simple) mental arithmetic. In school I learned how to navigate with a compass and map (an actual drawing on a piece of paper). I went on an expedition in the mountains for three days with no other navigation tools. I have now largely forgotten how to do this.

The brain is not a fixed machine but a living system that continuously adapts to the demands placed upon it. Neural pathways strengthen through repeated use and gradually weaken through neglect.

So what happens when the environment no longer asks very much of us at all?

Artificial intelligence can already generate polished writing, summarise books, translate languages and organise information with great competence. Those are extraordinary achievements, and I have no desire to pretend otherwise.

The question that interests me is a different one.

If struggling to retrieve a word strengthens memory, and struggling through a foreign language reshapes the brain, what role does struggling to articulate an idea play in the development of thought itself?

Perhaps none. Or perhaps the cognitive effort we’ve always treated as an inconvenience is an essential part of the process.

If cognitive effort gradually becomes optional, will we freely choose it anyway?

History doesn’t make me confident on that one. Physical exercise is largely unnecessary in the modern world.

Most of us know that exercise is good for us, yet most people do not do it. We know reading demands more of the mind than scrolling, yet scrolling is easier. We know learning another language changes the brain, yet relatively few adults choose to undertake the years of cognitive tension and frustration that it requires.

I don’t think any of these perspectives offer a definitive answer.

What I find striking is that they don’t openly contradict one another. They all point towards the same underlying idea.

The human mind appears to be shaped, by the environment it inhabits and technology is changing that relationship.

For the first time, we are beginning to inhabit environments that ask progressively less of certain cognitive abilities. That is, in many respects, a remarkable achievement.

Every generation has benefited from tools that reduced unnecessary effort, and history gives us very little reason to believe that rejecting technological progress is either realistic or desirable.

Societies that have embraced new technologies have generally flourished. Those that have attempted to resist are left behind.

The challenge, then, is not whether we should use these tools. It is whether we understand what they are changing and the knock on effects of that on us as individuals and on a societal level.

Perhaps the greatest danger isn’t that artificial intelligence will think for us. It is that we fail to notice how the environments we create gradually reshape the texture of our own minds.

Every environment rewards certain behaviours while punishing others. Over time those repeated behaviours become habits, those habits become capabilities and, eventually, they become part of our identity.

I don’t know the answer. But I have a growing suspicion that the future of human flourishing will depend less on the intelligence of our technology than on the wisdom with which we choose to use it.

That, perhaps, is the real challenge of this century. Not resisting technology, nor embracing it uncritically, but becoming far more intentional about the ways it shapes our attention, our thinking and, ultimately, the people we become.

For me, that has meant reading old books to counterbalance the constant stream of novelty, continuing to learn languages that could easily be translated for me and choosing, whenever I can, to wrestle with ideas before asking a machine to do it on my behalf.

More than anything, I hope we remain curious. Curious enough to ask not only what our technologies allow us to do, but who we become in the process.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of your day,

Ben