Look at that CEO frozen mid-sentence. Three sentences into explaining his company strategy without his laptop, and he just... stopped. The strategy exists in his head somewhere. But the pathway from thought to speech? Gone. His brain had rewired itself as a ChatGPT terminal. That's what we're dealing with. Not stupidity. Something scarier. Your brain on AI looks like this Remember struggling through a tough problem last year? That mental burn when you pushed through confusion to clarity? You don't do that anymore. Nobody does. We traded struggle for speed. Seemed smart at the time. Except struggle builds neural pathways. Skip the struggle, lose the pathways. Simple as that. The UCL study measured it - actual neural engagement drops when people outsource thinking to AI. Not metaphorically. Literally. Brain scans show less activity. First you save time. Then you save effort. Then you can't remember how to think without the machine. Watch yourself next time someone asks a complex question. That split-second reach for ChatGPT? Used to be a reach into your own knowledge. Now it's muscle memory to outsource. The weird part starts here AI becomes your brain's GPS. You know how people can't navigate without Google Maps anymore? Lost that internal compass? Same thing happening to thinking itself. You stop forming hypotheses. Stop connecting dots yourself. You query, select, refine. Query, select, refine. But the generation of original thought? That motor doesn't turn on anymore. Test this yourself. Try writing three paragraphs about something you know well. No research. No AI. Just you and blank page. Harder than it should be, right? Six months ago it wasn't this hard. Six months from now? You won't even try. Everyone sounds the same now Notice how every LinkedIn post reads identical? Every executive presentation hits the same beats? That's not coincidence. That's convergence. We're all drinking from the same probability well. ChatGPT serves up most-likely responses based on training data. Millions of people accept those responses. Feed them back into the system. The circle tightens.

Stumbled across this new AI tool called MapScan that gives you a full heatmap audit of your Google Maps rankings. It literally shows you where your business ranks across your entire city—visually. No dashboards, no digging through GMB. Just a clean map of where you're hot and where you’re invisible. Ran it for one of my local clients and was shocked by the red zones we didn’t even know existed. You get a free audit, no credit card or signup hoops. If you’re doing local SEO, this might be worth checking out. Curious if anyone else here has used it yet?