Available October 6, 2026
Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.
“Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” This startling premise begins Jared Cooney Horvath’s book The Digital Delusion, and it’s the starting point for his conversation with New View EDU host and NAIS President Debra P. Wilson. From there, they delve into the neuroscience behind the claim and how an education steeped in technology is changing how students learn and engage with the world.
Jared shares the research linking greater reliance on technology in the classroom to weaker cognitive outcomes and talks about the mechanisms that may underlie the decline. He discusses a phenomenon he calls “Google dementia” and shares how untethering classroom experiences from a lived, three-dimensional, spatial experience diminishes key aspects of memory formation. Deeper learning, he says, requires a more analog approach to work with human development.
Jared cautions educators to remember that humanity is at the center of everything they do. He points out that the brain is not a computer; it’s better than a computer, and we have invented the very technologies that now pose a potential threat to our well-being. Jared urges school leaders to lean into community-building and relationship formation to help us return to our purpose and make smart decisions about when, how, and whether certain technologies belong in our classrooms. “Remember the power of humans, of what we are capable of when we give ourselves the time and the space to think, to create, to ideate,” he says. “Humans matter.”
Key Questions
Some of the key questions Debra and Jared explore in this episode include:
- Many schools are wrestling with AI right now. What does the science of learning suggest about where AI can strengthen learning—and where it might inadvertently weaken it?
- Independent schools often pride themselves on being innovative. How do we know when we're genuinely innovating versus simply digitizing?
- What is one technology practice currently common in schools that you believe will look obviously misguided 20 years from now?
- As we look to the future of education, how should schools be thinking about the student-teacher relationship? How crucial is it to the future design of learning?
Episode Highlights
- “It's called the law of least effort. And this isn't a human law … everything in the universe follows this exact same law. If there are two ways to achieve a goal and one is easier than the other, we will take the easiest route, the law of least effort. It's there to save energy. So when you give a kid a tool and people are like, well, you know what? Your kid could use AI to ask them questions and have a Socratic dialogue. Well, mate, I could pop my car into neutral and push it to work every morning to increase my fitness. But of course, no one is actually ever going to do that because that's not what the tool is designed to achieve.” (17:19)
- “One of the greatest things I've learned over my 20 years of studying the brain is, it might only take you three years to learn how to speak, but it takes decades before you have anything meaningful to say. Learning how to use a tool is easy. I could learn how to use a hammer in 10 minutes. But, surely, building something meaningful with that hammer is going to take years of experience. And none of that has to do with tool training. It has to do with cognitive training.” (23:25)
- “So that's, I think, going to be the greater danger of AI is, whether or not kids use it to cheat is irrelevant. Of course they do. Whether or not it's going to harm learning, honestly, is irrelevant. Of course it does. I don't think there's any debate about any of this. How is it going to impact our children's development of who they are, what they believe, and how they interact with the world around them? That is the scarier question to me. And that's the one I don't hear a lot of people talking about.” (29:24)
- “This comes not from mimicking humanity. This comes from being a human. One of the biggest metaphor mistakes we make is people think the brain is a computer, the human is a machine. Those are metaphors, baby. Nobody genuinely thinks, no neuroscientist worth his or her salt genuinely thinks the brain is a computer. We know it is a lot more than a computer. A computer is a very weak version of what we have. But people take that stuff seriously. And the scary thing is, the more serious you take that, the more you elevate technology above humanity. You start to think technology is a better form of us. Therefore, it should take over. We invented technology. Not only is it not a better form of us, we created it.” (39:01)
Resource List
- Get a copy of Jared’s book, The Digital Delusion.
- Subscribe to Jared’s YouTube channel.
- Watch Jared’s TED Talk, Your Brain, Your Life.
- Keep up with Jared’s work at LME Global.
- Check out these case studies from Jared’s program, The Learning Blueprint.
Full Transcript
- Read the full transcript here.
Related Episodes
- Episode 90: The Future of Digital Literacy
- Episode 81: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing
- Episode 79: The Disengaged Teen
- Episode 78: The Power of Transcendent Thinking
- Episode 71: Exploring Generative AI in K-12 Schools
- Episode 68: Technology Innovation in Independent Schools
About Our Guest
Jared Cooney Horvath is an award-winning cognitive neuroscientist, best-selling author, and renowned keynote speaker with an expertise in human learning, memory, and brain stimulation.
Horvath has published six books and more than 60 research articles. He serves as director of LME Global, an organization dedicated to bringing cutting-edge brain and behavioral science to educators, students, and communities.
His research has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, the BBC, The Economist, PBS's Nova, and ABC’s Catalyst.