Desirable Difficulties

In this age of AI slop and growing stupidity, a key human trait is revealed.

There have been a lot of recent stories about the many ways that AI is dumbing all of us down. In fact, the phrase "brain rot" was named the Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, and things have gotten so bad that colleges are struggling to deal with students who can no longer read sentences or solve problems on their own.

I usually focus on nature topics, but today's newsletter will be a little different because it touches on an aspect of human nature that we overlook at our own peril.

Do you think we're smarter when we have instant access to worlds of information and ready answers to every one of our questions? No, it turns out that our brains are wired to grapple with obstacles, and we do our best learning when we face "productive frustration," or what psychologist Robert Bjork has famously called "desirable difficulties."

Frustration sounds like a bad thing, but it slows us down, increases our engagement, awakens our curiosity, and creates challenges that our brains love to solve. It turns out that these are vital parts of how we learn about and engage with the world around us, and in the absence of these challenges, we risk turning into passive drones.

Humans almost instantly forget or dismiss things that are easily understood, because it doesn't push our brains to grapple with those bits of information or weave them into long-term neural pathways.

Imagine that you do an internet search on a question and get an instant AI-generated summary distilled down to the most basic and easily digested factoids. That answer will probably satisfy your curiosity and give you confidence because you can repeat the information as you read it, or for a few moments afterward. But researchers have found that retention of these instant answers and our access to deeper layers of understanding is dismal at best.

And what happens when, in the words of journalist Sophie McBain, "large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk"?

A lot has been written on this topic, and there are many avenues I could explore in today's newsletter, but I find myself most fascinated by the idea of "desirable difficulties" and how they shape our minds. I love the idea that our brains can be trained like muscles when we push and exercise them.

If you'd like to learn more, I'll include a couple of links below, but if nothing else, I want to inspire you because in an age when so much of our agency is being taken away from us, challenging our minds is one thing we can take full ownership of.

Further Reading:

This Guardian article is an excellent read about brain rot: Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity?

This summary article is a concise introduction to the practice of desirable difficulty: What Is Desirable Difficulty and How to Use It