Your Brain, AI, and Reading Books (Thanks, Juliette Han, PhD!)

Before you go any further, I have to make it super clear that this blog is primarily my way of directing you to the work of Juliette Han, PhD. The research and the analysis are all hers. I’m just making sure you know about it.

 

Okay now that that’s out of the way, here’s part of the July 20th, 2026 Instagram post of hers that caught my attention:

 

There’s more she included in the middle of the post, but that’s why I encourage you to go follow her.

But don’t just follow her on Instagram. Check out her Substack, too. Because after I looked her up, I found another recent piece there (“Your Working Brain is the Next Luxury Asset”) about how important and valuable our brains are. (Which, duh.) And how if we don’t use them, well, basically, they shrivel. It’s a long, comprehensive, excellent breakdown of what overdependence on AI tools might possibly do to us.

“Just as the Industrial Revolution changed our bodies, AI is coming for our cognition, and brain health is about to become the asset that separates two classes: those who can afford to maintain their minds and those who cannot. Read on for why this is the likely future, no matter what you believe about the benefits of AI, and for what it actually takes to keep from paying for convenience with your brain.”  – Juliette Han, PhD June 2026

And I do recommend you read on. The whole thing. Not because I’m sharing this out of any anti-AI malice (and neither is she), but rather because I’m excited to draw the conclusion between both Han’s IG post and the Substack article, which is, basically from my standpoint: we need to read more, and keep doing it our whole lives.

“I am not anti-AI any more than I am anti-technology, and none of this is an argument for putting the tools down. It is an argument for treating your own cognitive effort the way you would treat a body you intend to keep functioning for decades, with deliberate friction, with relationships that do not get quietly handed off to software, and with the discipline to do the hard mental rep yourself, even when something else could do it faster, and you would never feel the difference the next morning. It’s like weightlifting—surely a machine can lift those weights, but that’s not how you grow your muscles (yes, that’s an em-dash, no, I wrote this and typed in that em-dash).” – Juliette Han, PhD June 2026

Perhaps we can do more reading with all the freed-up brain space that using AI is supposedly giving us?