The Senwitt Glossary.
Clear, cited definitions for the terms that shape the conversation about brain exercise, cognitive offloading, AI dependency, and skill practice.
AI brain fry
AI brain fry is the colloquial 2026 phrase for the cognitive fatigue and mental fog workers report after long stretches of working with AI assistants.
AI dependency
AI dependency is the pattern of overusing or over-trusting AI tools to the point that unaided work feels harder than it should — colloquially borrowed from clinical vocabulary, not a clinical diagnosis.
AI fatigue
AI fatigue is the cognitive and emotional exhaustion produced by sustained use of AI tools at work — adjacent to and partly overlapping with 'AI brain fry.'
AI overreliance
AI overreliance is the academic term for using AI past the point of useful assistance — where it substitutes for the cognitive work rather than supporting it.
Attention control
Attention control is the cognitive ability to direct, sustain, and shift attention deliberately — the foundation of focus and a central concept in the Focus Skill territory.
Cognitive debt
Cognitive debt is the gap between what AI helps you produce and what you actually encode while producing it — coined by the 2025 MIT Media Lab study on LLM-assisted essay writing.
Cognitive offloading
Cognitive offloading is the use of external tools — notebooks, calculators, search engines, AI assistants — to reduce internal mental effort on a task.
Digital amnesia
Digital amnesia is the popular-press term for the Google effect — forgetting information you know you can retrieve later via search or AI.
Skill atrophy
Skill atrophy is the gradual loss of a cognitive or technical skill when it stops being practiced — the use-it-or-lose-it principle applied to AI-era workflows.
The Google effect (digital amnesia)
The Google effect is the tendency to remember WHERE information can be found instead of WHAT the information is. First named in a 2011 Science paper by Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner.
Transactive memory
Transactive memory is a 1985 cognitive-science concept describing how groups distribute remembering across multiple people, so that no individual needs to remember everything alone.
Working memory
Working memory is the short-term cognitive workspace that holds and manipulates information for ongoing thinking — usually 4-7 items at a time, for seconds to minutes.