There’s a strange custody battle happening today, and the courtroom is in your own head. It’s not between divorcing parents or rival siblings; it’s between your innate capacity to think and the increasingly seductive technology that promises to do the thinking for you.

In my earlier post on the borrowed mind, I warned about a precarious drift toward cognitive passivity and how this results in a hollowing out of thought when we accept answers too quickly and fail to embrace the value of curiosity. It's mostly not a dramatic event. There’s no single moment when you lose some sort of mental footing. Instead, it’s a slow, almost imperceptible slide toward a kind of intellectual retreat.

The "symptoms" can be easy to miss. You stop asking “Why?” after the first good answer. Ambiguity feels less like an invitation to........

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