The Mind Under Optimization: What Adaptive AI Is Doing to the Developing Brain 

We are running an uncontrolled experiment on the developing brain, and the early returns are not reassuring. Students miscalibrated by adaptive AI feel mastery while losing the capacity to reason. This plenary names what is happening to teaching and learning under algorithmic encroachment. Adaptive systems downregulate cognitive load and bypass the desirable difficulties that build durable thought. The neurodevelopmental stakes are unforgiving. Between ages 16 and 23, white matter maturation constructs the circuitry of executive function and abstraction, a process structural MRI confirms is experience-dependent. When difficulty is outsourced, the architecture difficulty would have built does not fully form. What is being eroded is not subject matter. It is the capacity to think. Attendees will leave with a diagnostic framework, evidence-based strategies for productive struggle, and a view of what frictionless AI costs the developing mind. 

Danielle Gray-Singh

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Professor of Biological Sciences, Clark Atlanta University, Georgia, United States

Dr. Danielle N. Gray-Singh is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Clark Atlanta University and a tenured neuroscientist with research interests in neurodegenerative disease mechanisms, metabolic dysfunction relevant to Alzheimer’s-related pathways, and maternal-fetal health. She provides leadership for federally funded training initiatives that guide undergraduates into research and graduate education in STEM, with a focus on measurable student outcomes and high-impact mentoring structures. Her scholarship of teaching and learning explores rigorous, evidence-based pedagogy in gateway and upper-division STEM courses, alongside emerging questions about generative AI, bias, and assessment integrity.  Dr. Gray-Singh draws on a career shaped by science, mentorship, and lived awareness of vulnerability to advance teaching that is both demanding and humane, preparing students to safeguard health, truth, and continuity of care where resources are scarce and the stakes are real.