Cognitive offloading | Pedleysmiths Blog

Long before writing, and even “classrooms,” people shared knowledge through the telling of stories. These stories conveyed essential lessons in survival and reflected the social norms of their time, handed down through generations.

To fulfil their purpose, they had to be memorable. What remains unclear is, did the story evolve to fit the brain’s natural ability to remember or did stories in some way shape our brains to make them easier to recall – a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma.

Regardless, it could be argued that stories were our first educational technology, influencing culture, guiding decisions, and ensuring knowledge was not lost.

If you don’t have time to read this month’s blog – listen to my AI alter ego summarise the key points.

Today, when we think of stories, we often associate them with novels, films, animations and more recently podcasts. At its core, they are simply a structured way of sharing events and information, with most following a familiar pattern. They begin by setting the scene, move into a middle phase where the story unfolds and end with some form of resolution that provides clarity or closure. This structure helps us make sense of experiences, maintain attention, communicate ideas, evoke emotions, and connect with others in meaningful ways. All of which help with recall.

They are also incredibly persuasive, and can become a vehicle for knowledge transfer, simply saying, “let’s take a moment, relax, I want to tell you a story” changes the mood in the room and opens the mind for a new experience.

If you’re still unsure about their power, Yuval Noah Harari provides a compelling example. He explains that money holds no inherent value, a banknote is simply paper, and digital currency just data. What makes money meaningful is the collective belief in its worth. This shared understanding allows it to function as a medium of exchange for goods, services, and influence.

He goes on to say….

Money is probably the most successful story ever told” he argues. “It has no objective value… but then you have these master storytellers: the big bankers, the finance ministers… and they come and they tell a very convincing story. ‘Look this piece of paper, it is actually worth 10 bananas’… and it works. Try doing that with a chimpanzee – it won’t work!” – Yuval Noah Harari, historian, public intellectual, and bestselling author

Why are stories sticky?
But what is happening in the brain when you hear a story or read one for yourself? Why do stories stay with us long after we’ve heard them, what makes them stick?

Cognitive rapport – When someone tells a story, something remarkable happens in the brain. Instead of just processing words, the listener’s brain begins to light up in multiple areas all at once. Stories create what researchers call neural coupling, the listener’s brain patterns start to mirror the storyteller’s, helping ideas flow more smoothly and making them easier to understand (Stephens et al., 2010).

“The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.” – Mary Catherine Bateson, writer, and cultural anthropologist

Emotional – Importantly, stories also stir emotion and when emotions are triggered, the amygdala and hippocampus work together to strengthen memory (Article McGaugh, 2013). In one test, a neutral learning event was given an emotional focus. Subjects were asked to memorise a list of words, a non-emotional task. They were then exposed to a brief, intense emotional experience e.g. Putting their arms into icy water (Cold Pressor Stress Test), which released stress hormones, epinephrine, and cortisol, telling the brain it is an important event. When tested weeks later, the individuals had forgotten the cold-water experience, but remembered the list of words!

“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” – Robert McKee, author, lecturer, and story consultant

Structured – Stories give knowledge a shape and structure. A beginning, a challenge, and a resolution acting like mental scaffolding, allowing learners to slot new information into place. Structure also reduces cognitive load, (John Sweller 1988), and help create schemas, which are interconnected mental chunks of knowledge that are stored more easily in long term memory.

“Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses.” – Aleks Krotoski, broadcaster, journalist, and social psychologist

Engaging – And lastly, stories build a human connection, helping creat greater levels of engagement. Neuroscientist Paul J. Zak (2015) discovered that compelling narratives those with a strong dramatic storyline trigger the release of oxytocin, the neurochemical responsible for trust and empathy. In a learning context, this surge of empathy makes you more receptive to the message and strongly motivates, helping internalise the information and transforming simple facts into knowledge.

A word of caution – seductive details
However not all stories help us learn. The danger is that they include fascinating but irrelevant information known as “seductive details” (Harp & Mayer, 1998). This results in cognitive overload, causing the brain to waste resources processing the more interesting information at the expense of core principles. It can also break down that strong mental scaffolding, misdirecting the brain, to build a new organisational framework around the wrong idea. To avoid this, the detail in your narrative must directly support the learning objective, ensure the story integrates the facts, rather than just decorating them.

The final chapter
For educators, storytelling is not just a “nice extra” it’s a valuable tool and a natural way to help people learn. A well-told story draws attention, lowers resistance, and creates the sense that what follows is worth holding on to. Learners don’t just hear the information, they experience it, making knowledge far more memorable.
For learners, resist the urge to dismiss the story as a diversion from the important stuff, and instead listen with curiosity. They work on the mind in subtle ways connecting ideas, evoking emotions, and helping you see meaning, long after the classrrom door has closed. In this state, your brain does much of the hard work for you.

Want to know more?

From the back catalogue – Old Marley was as “dead as a door nail” – the power of analogy and Storytelling – The cave
Listen to Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and educator talk about “priming” and storytelling.

As we begin to better understand the capabilities of Generative AI (Gen AI) and tools such as ChatGPT, there is also a need to consider the wider implications of this new technology. Much has been made of the more immediate impact, students using Gen AI to produce answers that are not their own, but less is known as to what might be happening in the longer term, the effect on learning and how our brains might change over time.

There is little doubt that Gen AI tools offer substantial benefits, (see previous blogs, Let’s chat about ChatGPT and Chatting with a Chat Bot – Prompting) including access to vast amounts of knowledge, explained in an easy to understand manner, as well as its ability to generate original content instantly. However, there might be a significant problem of using these tools that has not yet been realised that could have implications for learning and learning efficacy. What if we become too reliant on these technologies, asking them to solve problems before we even think about them ourselves. This fear has found expression in debates well before Gen AI, in particular an article written by Nicholas Carr in 2008 asking “is Google making us stupid’’ – spoiler alert, the debate continues. And an interesting term coined by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer in 2012, “Digital dementia”, describing the changes in cognition as a result of overusing technology.

Abundance of books makes men less studious; it destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work. Hieronimo Squarciafico

But the focus of this blog is on cognitive offloading (Circ 1995), which as you might guess is about allowing some of your thinking/processing/learning to be outsourced to a technology.

Cognitive offloading
Cognitive offloading in itself is neither good nor bad, it refers to the delegation of cognitive processes to external tools or devices such as calculators, the internet and more recently of course Gen AI. In simple terms there is a danger that by instinctively and habitually going to Google or Chat GPT for answers, your brain misses out on an essential part of the learning process. That is reflecting on what you already know, pulling the information forward, and as a result reinforcing that knowledge, (retrieval practice), then combining it with the new information to better understand what is being said or required.

As highlighted by the examples in the paragraph above cognitive offloading is not a new concern, and not specifically related to Gen AI. However, the level of cognitive offloading, the sophistication in the answers and opportunities to use these technologies is increasing, and as a result the scale and impact is greater.

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain. Stephen Hawking

Habitual dependency – one of the main concerns is that even before the question is processed, the student instinctively plugs it into the likes of ChatGPT without any attention or thought. The prompt being regurgitated from memory, “please answer this question in 100 words”. This will lead to possibly the worst situation, where all thought is delegated and worryingly the answer unquestionable believed to be true.

You don’t remember your own number?” the man asked, startled. “No,” Einstein answered. “Why should I memorise something I can so easily get from a book?

**Cognitive offloading in action** – Blindly following the Sat Nav! Research has shown that offloading navigation to GPS devices impairs spatial memory.

Benefits of Cognitive offloading – it’s important to add that there are benefits of using cognitive offloading, for example it reduces cognitive load, which is a significant problem in learning. The technology helps reduce the demand on our short-term memory, freeing the brain to focus on what is more important.

Also, some disagree as to the long-term impact, arguing that short term evidence (see below) is not necessarily the best way to form long term conclusions. For example, there were concerns that calculators would affect our ability to do math’s in our heads, but research found little difference whether students used calculators or not. And the debate has moved on to consider how calculators could be used to complement and reinforce mental and written methods of math’s. These benefits have led some to believe that cognitive offloading increases immediate task performance but diminishes subsequent memory performance for the offloaded information.

There’s a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don’t have to think, you just have to get more information – gets very dangerous. Edward de Bono

Evidence
There is little research on the impact of Gen AI due to it being so new, but as mentioned above we have a large amount of evidence on what has happened since the introduction of the internet and search.

In the paper Information Without Knowledge. The Effects of Internet Search on Learning, Matthew Fisher, et al found that participants who were allowed to search for information online were overconfident about their ability to comprehend the information and those who used the internet were less likely to remember what they had read.
Dr Benjamin Storm the lead author of Cognitive offloading: How the Internet is increasingly taking over human memory, commented, “Memory is changing. Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory we become more reliant on it. Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother.”

The student who is using it (AI) because they lack the expertise is exactly the student who is not ready to assess what it’s doing critically. Chronicle of Higher Ed

What should you do?
To mitigate the risks of cognitive offloading, the simple answer is to limit or reduce your dependency and use Gen AI to supplement your learning rather than as a primary source. For example, ask it to come with ideas and lists but not the final text, spend your time linking the information together and shaping the arguments.

And finally – the role of mastery has changed

It used to be about mastery of content. Now, students need to understand content, but it’s much more about mastery of the interpretation and utilisation of the content. Inside Higher Ed.