Brooke McNamara

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275 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Brooke McNamara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Speaking of Psychology · AI “de-skilling”: What happens when we offload our work to AI? With Brooke Macnamara, PhD · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

One thing that Evan Risco and I have been talking about and and some of his colleagues is the likely difference in effects of using AI on skills and knowledge versus basic cognitive abilities.

So skills and knowledge are both acquired primarily through practice.

Through experience, right?

There's some kind of innate knowledge, but for the most part, when we acquire knowledge, we have to have some sort of experience where we learn it.

And likewise with skills, we're not born knowing how to play chess, for example.

We need to practice that.

Now, it's not that that is a hundred percent of it.

People vary in how quickly they learn, for example.

So it's not that practice explains a hundred percent of our skills, but it does explain for the most part changes within a person.

So if I practice the piano tomorrow, I'm probably going to be a little bit better than I was today, and so on.

So there's skills and knowledge are very sensitive to our experiences and therefore potentially.

how much we're offloading.

Basic cognitive abilities or fundamental cognitive abilities, foundational abilities.

Again, these are not perfect distinctions.

And of course, there's there's bleeding into skills and abilities.

But broadly speaking, abilities are kind of more stable, sort of your reasoning ability, your working memory capacity, sort of how much information you.

Hold in your mind.

And of course, there's development as kids.

And of course, there's declines at older age.

But broadly, there have been a lot of interventions trying to improve basic cognitive abilities.

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