- NEWS FEATURE, 23 September 2026
How to stay smart in the age of AI: the science of critical thinking
There is growing concern that AI can blunt memory and reasoning. But science shows ways to keep the brain sharp.
Earlier this year, education researcher Lixiang Yan realized that students could outsource all of their work for his university course to artificial intelligence.
In praise of human teachers: universities must resist outsourcing everything to AI
Yan, who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, was using an agentic AI called Codex to set up an online course on a learning-management platform. But it quickly became clear that the adept AI could independently complete all the assignments, answer questions and participate in discussions, “without the learner being intellectually engaged” at all, Yan says.
The experience made Yan think that teaching students to reason and think for themselves “is more critical than ever”, he says. And he is hardly alone. In a 2025 survey of more than 1,000 US faculty members, conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 90% said they thought that generative AI will reduce students’ critical-thinking skills. Around 20% of higher-education students who use AI said that they already find it harder to work through problems without it, according to more than 8,000 respondents to a global survey this year.
“Learning happens as a consequence of cognitive processing. Cognitive processing is typically effortful, and that’s what AI effectively removes,” says cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “People are really worried about that.”
And science — in which people need to critically evaluate theories and data — is one important area that’s under threat from the AI revolution in large language models (LLMs). ”There is a risk that students outsource precisely the activities through which scientific thinking develops: formulating hypotheses, interpreting evidence, considering alternatives and struggling with uncertainty,” says Thomas Nygren, who studies education and critical thinking at Uppsala University in Sweden.
But all is not lost. Specialists in education and cognition have been studying critical thinking and how to develop it for years, and some have useful tips on how to stay cognitively sharp in the age of AI. “The building of critical thinking and higher-order thinking skills have become even more important,” says Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, who led a ten-year programme on critical thinking at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
What is critical thinking?
Ask five people to define critical thinking, and you’ll get five different replies. (I tried.) “Critical thinking is sort of the pinnacle” of human cognition, says Willingham. “It’s kind of a basket term that captures instances in which people are thinking well.”
Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02930-6
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