< You might be suffering from AI brain fry; NPR, April 13, 2026

NPR; < You might be suffering from AI brain fry

"HERMAN: Yeah. I mean, the researchers, they describe this as basically hopping around between different tools and feeling overwhelmed. Not by just having to multi-task - which is already a problem in a lot of jobs - but by dealing with a whole bunch of output. So if you have a programming tool that can kind of run in the background and starts adding features to software really quickly, you have another tool that's constructing a report from you, it's searching the web and pulling together, you know, a market research document. You have another tool in the background that you're in a, like, constant chat with trying to refine some idea for a talk you have to give - you're just kind of getting first pulled in all these different directions, and then you're kind of spamming yourself. Like, you're just producing...

(LAUGHTER)

HERMAN: ...All of this product. And it's harder, you know, as you use more and more tools to keep track of, like, whether this output is actually relevant to your job, whether you're doing anything that you need to be doing or whether you're kind of creating new work for yourself. And so the researchers described in this survey of nearly 1,500 different people in different professions, this sensation of feeling kind of like, as they say it, fried or having, like, a brain fog, feeling kind of like mentally paralyzed by the amount of stuff that you have to keep track of and kind of check and monitor."