What should we choose to keep human in the age of AI?

I’m TJ Power, a neuroscientist, no.1 bestselling author of The DOSE Effect, and the founder of DOSE® Lab. Over the last 12 months, my team and I have been laser focused on a new question: how can we help society build successful brains that are ready for the AI future?

Recently, with Asana, I hosted a series of dinners in Sydney and Melbourne for C-suite executives. Throughout the evenings, we explored how leaders can embrace AI while holding on to the natural human abilities that will become increasingly valuable as AI technology develops.

We had one question that sat at the centre of our conversations:

What are we choosing to keep human?

In the 1970s, humans were scared we would lose our ability to do fast mental arithmetic with the invention of the calculator.

Today, I’m sure you can feel that your quick mental maths is probably not what it once was.

And that’s okay to some extent.

But the skills AI could cause us to use less are much more fundamental to the human experience and each of our futures.

AI can already think through problems, generate ideas, make slide decks, help us make decisions and write messages to the people around us.

This can save a huge amount of time. But when a technology performs a human skill for us, we naturally spend less time practising that skill ourselves. And the associated brain area can begin to atrophy.

The early neuroscience is beginning to show this.

In a recent MIT Media Lab study, people writing essays with an LLM demonstrated up to 55% lower neural connectivity in the brain. They also found it more difficult to recall and quote what they had written.¹

It's clear that when AI performs more cognitive work for us, our brains engage less deeply in the task.

There are four human abilities my research team and I believe we must intentionally hold on to and begin to strengthen:

1. Deep thinking, supported by your prefrontal cortex

Your prefrontal cortex helps you hold information in your mind, sustain your attention, resist distractions, and think deeply about complex problems.²

AI can now analyse a problem and present us with an answer in seconds. This is incredibly useful, but the efficiency can tempt us to skip the demanding thinking that would normally take place first.

The goal is not to avoid AI. It is to avoid becoming a passive recipient of its thinking.

Form your own perspectives. Challenge your biases. Have time every day dedicated to screen-free thinking about your business problems before asking AI to contribute.

AI has the ability to replace your deep thinking or to amplify it. Selecting which occurs in your life is going to be crucial.

For leaders, this ability is fundamental to strong decision-making and high performance.

2. Creative imagination, supported by the default mode network

Next we have your default mode network. An area of your brain that becomes active when your screens disappear. It lights up when you daydream, and enables you to imagine the future and randomly connect seemingly completely unrelated ideas.³

This is why good ideas often arrive in the shower, while walking or when staring out of a window.

Research published in Science Advances found that generative AI could improve the judged quality of an individual creative output. However, it also very clearly made different people’s creative outputs more similar to one another.⁴

AI can appear to make an individual piece of work better while making our collective work more alike. The more alike our work becomes, the more we lose the creative part of our brain that makes us unique. Creative uniqueness will become an increasingly valuable organisational and leadership attribute as AI evolves.

AI can help us develop and execute ideas, but our most important creative ideas should still originate inside our human minds, arriving naturally through time spent destimulating and embracing boredom.

3. Intuitive judgement, supported partly by the insular cortex

Your insular cortex then helps you integrate signals from inside your body with emotion and cognition. It contributes to the internal sense that something feels right or wrong. Your gut feeling.⁵

If we continually ask AI what to say, what to choose and what to do, we give ourselves fewer opportunities to practise reading our own internal intuition.

AI can provide information and identify patterns. But important leadership decisions still require your personal, direct human experience.

4. Human connection, supported partly by the temporoparietal junction

And finally your temporoparietal junction helps you distinguish yourself from others and consider another person’s perspective.⁶

AI can make communication faster. It can summarise conversations and improve the structure of a message. But efficiency is not the only purpose of human communication.

People want to feel that another person has taken the time to understand them.

In leadership especially, trust is built through sustained attention, presence, and communication that feels like someone actually cares. This is something many people are struggling with in the new AI email and AI presentation decks world. There's less human touch in it.

Your Brain Experiment

At these dinners, we explored where this AI vs human line should sit. AI can take away repetitive administrative work, organise information and accelerate team performance. Humans can retain responsibility for deep thinking, original creative ideas, important decisions and high-quality human connection and brainstorming.

Used this way, AI has the potential to make us more human, not less.

Your brain experiment from this article is very simple.

In the next 24 hours dedicate some time to leaving your phone on your desk, walking outside your home or office, and letting your brain think deeply, work creatively, and utilise your intuitive judgement. Once you return, share with your colleague, friend or partner the thoughts you had that were most interesting.

This activity will strengthen your prefrontal cortex (deep thinking), activate your default mode network (creativity), and enable you to utilise your insular cortex (intuition) and temporoparietal junction (human connection). Supporting you to build a stronger, healthier, and more successful brain as AI evolves.

This simple daily brain practice is how we hold on to what makes us human.

What are you choosing to keep human? I’d love to hear from you - tj@thedoselab.com.

Have a great day!

References

1. Kosmyna, N. et al. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. MIT Media Lab.

2. Friedman, N. P. and Robbins, T. W. (2022). The Role of Prefrontal Cortex in Cognitive Control and Executive Function. Neuropsychopharmacology.

3. Beaty, R. E. et al. (2015). Default and Executive Network Coupling Supports Creative Idea Production. Scientific Reports.

4. Doshi, A. R. and Hauser, O. P. (2024). Generative AI Enhances Individual Creativity but Reduces the Collective Diversity of Novel Content. Science Advances.

5. Zhang, R., Deng, H. and Xiao, X. (2024). The Insular Cortex: An Interface Between Sensation, Emotion and Cognition. Neuroscience Bulletin.

6. Liang, X. et al. (2023). The Role of Prefrontal Cortex and Temporoparietal Junction in Interpersonal Comfort and Emotional Approach. Scientific Reports.