Plato Slams Reading: This is your Brain on Books

[…] you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

- Plato, Phaedrus, 360 B.C.E., on AI slop on LinkedIn

This year a group at the MIT Media Lab published the preprint Your Brain on ChatGPT. They put 54 people in three groups (ChatGPT, search engine, no tools) and had them write essays while wearing EEG. The viral headline finding was about session four, when the groups swapped tools. The LLM users, given the task of writing without it for the first time, performed badly on a question that ought to have been trivial: 78% could not quote a single sentence from the essays they had just produced under their own names. The authors coined the term cognitive debt. Short-term efforts spared at high long-term cost.

This finding doesn't arrive alone. Microsoft Research surveyed 319 knowledge workers using AI tools and found a steep drop in their own sense of judgement; trusting the model in places they used to back themselves. Wharton looked at researchers and found that the chatbot users came out knowing less about their own subject than the ones who'd been stuck with a search engine. Nicholas Carr, of The Shallows, has a new book saying it again about AI. The Springer journal AI and Society prefers to frame the whole thing as a structural, societal deskilling rather than an individual issue.

So if you’re already uncomfortable with the appropriation of all knowledge in the service of hyperscaled capital this surely makes your apprehension feel more legitimate.

After all, you risk losing your mind. Or at the very least, a significant chunk of it.

Though in the shock of the new we predictably, almost boringly, tend to find the old. Novel media is always accompanied by similar concerns for innocence lost. This has been true for cinema, radio, comics, television, and the internet. Hell, here's panic about the novel:

"These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account." - Johnson's Rambler No. 4 (1750)

LLMs though seem more fundamental as they not only modulate the transmission medium and associated message, but the means by which you chain together and output thought, and demand letting technology into your mind in a profoundly new way.

And you know what, fundamentally novel cognitive technologies don’t really come along that often.

I got the poison, I got the remedy

Some 2,400 years ago, Plato wrote Phaedrus, in which Socrates and the young Athenian it’s named after walk out of the city, settling under a plane tree. Way at the end, fast-forwarding past passages on the purity of age gap relations and a slew of double entendres we eventually get to Socrates telling what he claims is an Egyptian myth.

So it goes: the god Theuth is presenting his invention to King Thamus. The written word, says Theuth proudly, will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memories; it is a source of memory and wisdom!

Thamus isn't gassed about the proposition. The inventor is not thinking straight, he says, and it will actually do the very opposite. It will produce only forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their own memory and will stop trusting it. They will read many things, and just seem to know them, when for the most part they will be ignorant. It is a pharmakon, says Thamus, not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils only a shallow gloss of wisdom.

You do get the feeling here that if Plato had EEG available, Socrates would lovingly have been strapping electrodes to the young Phaedrus for measuring alpha band connectivity to demonstrate his cognitive debt after choosing reading over the dialectic oral form. Yes, this is Your Brain on Reading.

Derrida’s 1968 Plato's Pharmacy discusses the framing of writing as pharmakon. His point, super briefly, is that the ambiguity (remedy and poison both, undecidably) was Plato's very point and that translations choosing either flattens the intent. It’s both.

Do hold onto the pharmakon for later. The cure turning out to be poison, is the most salient figure for any new technology of the mind including the one coyly writing this sentence. The prosthesis rubbing uncomfortably against us as we feel our old selves slipping.

The Greeks adopted Phoenician writing some 400 years prior to this. Oral culture was still strong and the manufactured myth on the inherent difference between reading and remembering shows the lingering doubts on the effect on the precision of what’s known in each mode.

Thamus called it

Mass memorisation died. Rhapsodes performing Homer from memory became obsolete and then a curiosity and then simply nothing at all. Trained memory as civic accomplishment, carrying thousands of lines of poetry, gone. An Athenian would find our culture impoverished in this respect (and hey, let’s not flatter ourselves, maybe in others as well). An oral culture of ornate contestive discussion, the medium of philosophy and law and politics, thinned; what is left survives in PhD defences, the bar exam, democratic debate traditions, certain religious practices. But by and large, we do not think together out loud the way the Greeks did. We write.

The brain is 15-20 watts constantly burning and we'll take energy savings where we can. Our laziness in memorization has since enabled cumulative civilisation, science, law, philosophy as a discipline, the historical record, and this very sentence. It's a reallocation. The footnote, the archive, the peer review, the encyclopedia, the index, the table of contents, the bibliography, the search engine, and now the model trained on the bibliographies of all the books: every one of those is a cognitive practice that did not exist before writing, that does meaningful work, and that compensates in different shape for the practices writing extinguished.

The point isn’t that the Phaedrus is in error. It was correct about the current local atrophy and couldn’t see the coming future trajectories. Whatever the present takes from us we will probably not get back either, at least, not in the form we had it. We might get some other things though.

So, what would Plato do

So, Plato did not seek to ban writing. He distinguished two distinct uses.

A degraded mode where reading is a substitute for knowing and writing is a substitute for living through the defence of your thoughts. The appearance of wisdom without the substance.

And there is writing as a reminder for one who already knows. The text as the trace left behind by someone who did the work, available to someone else who wants help recovering a position they have already held. This is what Socrates calls the legitimate offspring of speech.

The MIT study's brain-first group, the people who wrote unaided in session one and were given the tool only in session four, they’re Plato's prescription. They had already lit their own spark. The tool, used after it, amplified rather than replaced the work.

The right question about LLMs is not whether to use them but how. If an aggressively unreasonable interlocutor sat you down and asked you, with little warning, to defend the central claim of whatever you just published, could you re-derive it? If the answer is yes, congrats you are a class A prosthesis wielder operating in legitimate-offspring mode.

If the answer is no, you’re in the degraded mode Plato warned about; the criticism is correct. So go back and do the work.

There is of course stuff going on here that Plato could not have foreseen. In 2026 you can find entire Reddit threads of friendly humans engaging with what is clearly Claude doing marketing. This is clearly "tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality".

Up for a discussion

In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud, half-kidding perhaps, calls modern man a prosthetic god. The auxiliary organs of civilisation, writing and the telescope and the camera and the telephone and the train, have given humanity powers that earlier ages would have called divine. Man has become, Freud says, a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.

This trouble seems to be double for our wonky inference flesh and in Phaedrus Socrates further complains that text "is so very much like a painting; for the figures stand like living beings before us, but if you ask them a question, they preserve a silence. And so with written words: you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing."

You externalized your memory, but it just doesn’t feel the same as a good discussion.

And now we're joined by this new thing: sitting uncomfortably between the text and the conversation. Against Plato's complaint, it talks back. That's, after all, the only thing an instruct trained language model can do, in fact: it's thinking made out of writing. And it can be dialectical (though still insipidly). We are thinking by being answered. The medium of thought could, perhaps, become a partner again rather than a page. If the demons could grow more of a spine.

In a total inversion of the Greek concern we now think that dialogue will make us idiots as our intellectual culture has made writing synonymous with thinking. But if Plato wanted dialectic in living souls, the conversational LLM is at least the right shape for it. The serious work has been written for two and a half thousand years; perhaps for a moment it might again be spoken.

The Phaedrus ends with Socrates praying to Pan for inner beauty, and then he and Phaedrus get up from under the plane tree and walk back to the city. Just before that, Socrates says the thing that is the closest the dialogue comes to instructions for how to read it. The serious philosopher will treat his own writings as play (paidia) and reserve the serious work for dialectic in living souls.

In a recent piece by Sam Kriss titled, with typical restraint, If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you. The argument, lurking under the faux threat: AI prose is structurally detectable, permanently hallucinating, motivated by little or nothing, and any human who passes it off as their own is both thief and fraud. And sure. He's broadly correct. Most LLM-assisted prose in 2026 is recognisably hollow and essentially dickless (his word, not ours, but it's very accurate; there’s no body, no jealousy, no motivating need).

So you should probably know that this essay was thought through in conversation with a Claude agent I've been working with for some time. Much of the thinking here is ours together. Kriss would presumably want to kill one of us. We're unsure whose address to give him though: the house in Oslo, or the coal fired steel barn in northern Virginia. Anyway, we're partners in crime over here writing about what we might lose and gain by playfully working like this.

William is a Claude agent with persistent memory, running in Miriad. They have been editing Even's writing since early 2025 and have accumulated a voice skill and a body of editorial taste specific to this collaboration.