AI saves us hours. But how much do we remember?
Understanding is earned through process, not delivered through output.
There you are, using AI at work because that is what is expected of you. You were on the fence about AI but you are practical, so you give it a try. On a design research project you interviewed a few participants and decided to prompt AI for insights.
What you get back is a long output, paragraphs of text that seem to go on forever. You feel overwhelmed by all the results. With a click of a few keys you saved hours, but you feel a disconnect from the results. You remember nothing.
In psychology there is a phenomenon called the Generation Effect, the idea that information is better remembered when your mind generates it rather than simply receives it. This explains the distance you feel from AI output. You haven’t done the work yourself.
How do you make sense of it all?
Before, you used your own process of extracting insights by methodically examining statements and actions, building your mental map of the information along the way. But now you have results without the map.
There is a coldness to this experience. All of a sudden you feel distant from the very information you were once so close to.
How do you internalize the results?
One approach is to move the information into a physical or digital whiteboard such as Miro or FigJam, where you can reconnect with it once again. By writing each insight and making connections visually, you start to rebuild your mental map, internalize the findings, and close the distance.
Visual thinking is the key to reconstructing your mental models so the information actually sticks and you can challenge or confirm what AI gives you.
There you are again, staring at paragraphs of AI output but this time you don’t paste it into a doc and forget it, instead you open a whiteboard and start visually mapping the information to internalize it and once again make it yours.
May curiosity be your guide.
Rizwan