Spending more time chatting with AI than with people could change the way our brains develop. If kids turn to AI to navigate life’s difficult moments, they miss out on the opportunity to strengthen important social skills, which could hinder their emotional growth. This is because of how interacting with AI affects a process our brains go through called synaptic pruning.

What is Pruning?

At birth, our brains have almost all of the neurons they will ever have. Through time and experience, children’s brains develop millions of synaptic connections, and this changes the brain by increasing its density. But if a connection isn’t used, or if it becomes irrelevant in our daily lives, it gets cut out. This pruning process is especially active from late childhood to early adolescence.

It's like our brains go through a renovation where certain underused areas get shut down. We keep the connections we use the most and get rid of the ones we don’t. It helps the brain stay efficient and reduces the amount of unnecessary information. This process is designed to sharpen our thinking, social skills and decision-making as we develop into adults. But what if, instead, our brains start pruning out the connections that help us gain these skills?

How AI Affects Brain Pruning

Think about a garden. Pruning helps it thrive. Now imagine if you didn’t just prune the weeds in your garden, but your flowers, too. You’d be cutting out the parts of the garden that you want to keep. When kids start using AI to perform tasks that require problem-solving and critical thinking, or they spend more time chatting with a bot than with their friends, they could be increasing brain pruning in the same way. The emerging concern is that neglecting to practice these skills at a time when the brain is weeding things out could potentially lead to the loss of neural connections.

These connections are essential to helping us understand how others are thinking or feeling by reading their facial expressions and body language. They strengthen our social awareness and empathy. When we prune these skills out, it can cause us to experience things like anxiety and depression, and it can weaken our ability to solve problems or connect with others.

The good news is, these skills can still be developed throughout our lives thanks to the power of neuroplasticity, our brain’s ability to change in response to experience. With effort and repetition, relearning these skills is possible, but our brain’s overall plasticity declines with age. That’s why it’s so important for us to be mindful of the potential connection between AI use and synaptic pruning as kids continue to incorporate AI more and more into their daily lives.

AI can be a tool for inspiration or gathering information, but it isn’t a substitute for interacting with other people. During the important pruning years of adolescence, kids need real-world experiences to help build the connections in the brain that allow us to solve problems and understand others. Every potential challenge, conversation or interaction is a chance to strengthen these connections that help us thrive as adults.