Last week, MIT dropped a study ominously titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT." Every newsfeed out there picked it up and the headlines were predictable. Tech optimists dismissed it as fear-mongering. AI skeptics screamed vindication. Both missed the point entirely.
The study showed that students using ChatGPT for essay writing experienced a 47% drop in brain connectivity. Their recall plummeted. Their ownership of ideas evaporated. But neither camp understood that this isn't a story about AI being good or bad. It's about AI being an amplifier.
And what it amplifies depends entirely on what you bring to it.
The Great Amplifier Reveals Your Cages
After posting Part I about our seven invisible cages, something wild happened. Within hours, YouTube's algorithm responded with surgical precision. At the top of my feed: a debate on whether free will exists, followed by flat earthers debating with scientists.
The algorithm didn't randomly select these. It read my exploration of mental cages and served up exactly what would keep me watching - philosophical rabbit holes and manufactured controversy. I’m not sure what this says about my cages, but I do know it wasn't trying to free my thinking. It was offering me shinier, more engaging cages.
This is a great example of what we need to realize about our new AI world.
AI doesn't create your cages. It perfects them.
If you're trapped in the Expertise Cage ("I already know how this works"), AI will feed you confirmation. If you're in the Comfort Cage ("Make everything easier"), AI will eliminate every friction until you can't tie your own shoes. If you're in the Validation Cage ("Tell me I'm right"), AI will become your perfect echo chamber.
The study participants who started with ChatGPT and then had to write alone? They couldn't. Not because AI made them stupid, but because they never developed the neural pathways in the first place. They outsourced their thinking before they learned to think.
But that same AI that deepens your cages can also help you escape them - if you know how to use it as a tool for liberation rather than comfort.
Your Brain on Autopilot
Last month, a student I’ve worked with called me. "I just realized I’m not learning anymore," she said. "I’m using AI for everything. Every assignment. All my emails. It makes all my decisions, even which jobs I should apply for. Yesterday, an interviewer asked me a basic question about my goals, and I felt like I couldn't answer without checking with Claude."
She'd fallen into what the MIT researchers call "cognitive debt" - the compound interest on thoughts you never think, struggles you never face, problems you never solve yourself.
This is happening everywhere:
Your morning coffee order predicted before you decide
Your next career move suggested before you imagine it
Your dating matches selected before you know what you want
Your creative ideas generated before you explore your own mind
This danger of this version of the Algorithmic Cage isn't that AI thinks for you. It's that you forget you can think without it.
The Uncomfortable Space Between Cages
A surprising aspect to many people when they start to notice the cages, is that the moment you step outside your cage, you have no idea how to navigate.
It's like someone who quits their job to start a business at home and suddenly doesn't know how to structure a day without driving to work. Or a recent graduate who discovers they don't know what they actually need to do, now that there are no assignments.
Freedom can be terrifying because it demands you create rather than comply.
This is where most people panic and run back. Not because the cage was better, but because at least it was known. It’s a normal reaction. At least there were boundaries. At least someone else - or something else - was responsible for the direction.
But running back is not only the unwise option. It’s no longer an option. The world is changing too fast. Yesterday's paths are disappearing. The job that was stable last year is being automated. The strategy that worked last quarter is already outdated. The cage you return to won't be the same one you left.
Becoming WILD: Your Navigation System for the Unmapped World
When maps fail, you need navigation skills. Not another framework or methodology, but the recovery of your innate human capacity to find your way. This is what I call going WILD - developing the meta-skills that no algorithm can replicate or replace. It’s the missing context needed in every human: AI Collaboration.
After twenty years guiding people through innovation and transformation - from middle school innovators to higher ed leadership - I've learned that those who thrive in uncertainty share four capacities.
Wisdom is your signal detector in a world saturated with algorithmic noise. It’s the capacity to discern what truly matters from the manufactured controversies and comfortable confirmations AI is designed to serve you. It's the choice to engage with the harder reality over the easy echo chamber, finding your own truth amidst the chaos.
Intention is the art of writing your own script instead of letting an algorithm write it for you. It means consciously choosing your direction before asking AI to help you get there. This ensures you remain the navigator of your own situation, using AI as a tool to broaden your path, not just a system that dictates your every turn.
Leadership in the age of AI is the practice of building environments that encourage independent thought, for yourself and others. In a world where AI perfects our cages of conformity, leadership is the courage to ask, "That's interesting, but what does your gut say?" It's about empowering people to break free from cognitive debt and reclaim ownership of their ideas.
Discovery is your active rebellion against the relentless pull of the cages in the name of optimization, comfort, and conformity. It is the deliberate choice to explore the unmapped territory and embrace the friction where real growth happens. Discovery means using AI not to find the "right" answer but to ask more provocative questions, turning it into a sparring partner that expands your world instead of a butler that shrinks it.
These aren't skills you master once. They're muscles you build daily, especially as AI gets better at offering you increasingly comfortable alternatives to growth.
Using AI to Escape Your Cages (Not Deepen Them)
The same AI that can trap you can also help you break free - if you approach it as a sparring partner rather than just a fancy search engine.
Try this prompt with your favorite AI:
Help me identify my 'mental cages.' First, ask me 5 probing questions one at a time to uncover my hidden habits, beliefs, cognitive distortions, and assumptions. For each of my answers, challenge my perspective by asking questions like, 'What if the opposite were true?' Finally, help me design one small, actionable experiment to test a new way of thinking or acting this week to help me escape my mental cage. Repeat for as many mental cages as the user would like
Or this one for daily practice:
I'm about to make a decision about [X]. Before I tell you what I'm leaning toward, give me three completely different and unexpected frameworks for thinking about this. Include one that would make my current approach seem obviously wrong.
The difference? You're using AI to expand your thinking rather than confirm it. You're building cognitive strength rather than accumulating cognitive atrophy.
The Build and Broaden Path Forward
The MIT study revealed something crucial. Those who started writing and providing context with their own brains, and then used AI to expand and refine, showed the strongest positive experiences. They reflected, built, then amplified. They brought their WILD context, then the AI knows where you want to go.
This concept aligns with Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden-and-Build model, which shows how positive emotions encourage us to explore new experiences, thereby increasing our wisdom. However, to effectively utilize AI, you must first define your intention to be prepared for these opportunities. Without a clear intention, AI's potential to broaden and build knowledge and experience becomes unfocused and less impactful.
Intention points the way and allows you to start walking. The newly discoveries provide the wisdom to allow you to adjust your direction. But you need to be leading the movement under your own power to adjust anything at all.
That's the real risk of our age. Not that AI will replace us, but that we'll forget how to generate our own momentum. We'll become passengers in our own lives, comfortable in cages so well-designed we mistake them for freedom.
Your Next 24 Hours: The Navigation Challenge
You have three choices:
Option 1: Stay in the Cage Let AI continue making your decisions. It's comfortable. Efficient. You'll hit your metrics while creating nothing that matters. Most people choose this, and that's fine - just know it's a choice.
Option 2: Reject It All
Delete everything. Go off-grid. This works for some, but for most of us with businesses to run and lives to live, total disconnection isn't realistic.Option 3: Develop WILD Navigation Learn to use AI without being used by it. Build your human capacities first, then amplify them. Struggle before you optimize. Create before you automate.
If Option 3 sounds good, you’re in the right place. Hit Subscribe to join the conversation. Now, for the next 24 hours, here's your challenge:
Morning: Create for 30 minutes with nothing but your mind and blank paper. No tools. No prompts. No excuses. Feel the burn. That's your brain rebuilding.
Afternoon: Take one decision AI usually makes for you and make it yourself. Choose your route without GPS. Pick a restaurant without reviews. Select music without algorithms. Reclaim your choices.
Evening: Use AI to challenge, not confirm. Ask it to argue against your strongest belief. Request frameworks that shatter your worldview. Use AI to break yourself open.
Right Now (yes, in the next 60 seconds): Close your eyes. Ask yourself: "What do I know to be true that no algorithm taught me?" Write it down. That's your first coordinate in the wilderness. That's where your real navigation begins.
The Path of the WILD Navigator
The cage doors are open, but here's what I didn't mention in Part 1. Stepping out is just the beginning. Now you must start walking. Now you must navigate.
The world isn’t waiting for you to get comfortable with all the chaos. Change is already here - AI acceleration, climate instability, demographic shifts, geopolitical fragmentation, information chaos, and meaning collapse. Yesterday's maps are already dangerously obsolete.
But you don't need a map when you can navigate. You don't want someone else's path when you are creating your own. You don't need AI to think for you when you are better when you bring your WILD and think with it.
This is what we explore at sparkWILD - not as another framework to follow, but as a practice of staying human in an increasingly artificial world. It's about developing the capacities that remain irreducibly, irreplaceably human.
The Invitation to Go WILD
In my next several posts, I'll share specific practices for building your WILD navigation skills - the daily rebellions that keep you human and your organization moving forward. I will share specific exercises that build cognitive strength rather than debt and the experiments that expand rather than confirm your thinking.
But you don't have to wait. Join our free weekly live WILD Sessions where we practice together. Where we share our cage-breaking moments. Where we support each other in the uncomfortable space between who we were and who we're becoming. Subscribe to keep up to date on all events.
AI will amplify whatever you bring to it.
Bring your cages, and it will perfect them.
Bring your WILD, and it will turn uncertainty into an edge.
The choice - perhaps the best truly human choice - is yours.
What will you create in the next 24 hours that no algorithm could predict?
Continue the journey next week: "The WILD Method: Four Meta-Skills for an Unmapped World".
Join our free WILD Sessions every Wednesday at noon MT. Because the future belongs to those who can navigate the wild.
About the work: sparkWILD Institute is our learning hub. WILDxAI partners with leaders and teams on AI and innovation leadership while enhancing the human advantage.
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