The Generation Effect: When the Journey is the Point
The Risks of Cognitive Outsourcing and the Benefits of Struggle
Black cab drivers in London spend years memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets and 100,000 landmarks in order to master “The Knowledge” and prove they can navigate the entire city without GPS. Not only do they become better drivers, but researchers have found their hippocampi physically enlarge from the effort. Drivers who rely on GPS are often faster in the beginning (mastering The Knowledge can take years), but drivers who put in the effort are better and more efficient in the long-run.
I’m no cabbie, but I am an avid reader, and I feel like there are some significant similarities when we think about the journey of reading a book. It’s easy to find summaries of books or have summaries generated for you these days. And using these methods is certainly faster than reading the book. But anyone who skips the book misses the entire journey, all the plot curves and character arcs. And the journey is where the understanding actually happens. Reading the full book forces you to think through the details, grapple with problems and solutions, and get a deeper understanding of what the author is describing. The reading journey actually changes you, just like memorizing all the streets in London does.
None of happens when someone else does the work, goes on the journey, and hands you the conclusion, whether it is the GPS route or the summary of the book. You know of the book. But you don’t know it. You can follow the directions, but couldn’t navigate without them.
Psychologists have a name for the gap between these two states: the generation effect. Information we produce ourselves (even if it’s imperfect) gets remembered better than information we simply receive. And this isn’t a fringe finding. A meta-analysis of 86 studies confirms the effect: material we generate ourselves sticks much better. Because generating something (putting in the effort) forces retrieval, connection, and organization, which is the cognitive work that encodes information into long-term memory. While reading an explanation feels like understanding, it usually isn’t. It’s recognition (which fades) mistaken for comprehension (which doesn’t).
I keep coming back to this because it’s the clearest lens I’ve found for thinking about what AI is doing to how we work. AI isn’t necessarily bad, but it is very good at producing the attractive, finished output that feels like understanding without requiring the labor that creates it.
Offloading is not outsourcing
The useful distinction here isn’t “AI is good” or “AI is bad.” It’s one that the cognitive scientist Paul Kirschner drew recently: the difference between offloading and outsourcing.
