Nair reflects on the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, including the phenomenon of cognitive atrophy, where reliance on AI is said to diminish our cognitive capabilities. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining human insight and creativity amidst the rise of AI, advocating for exploration and original thinking rather than merely accepting AI-generated solutions.
Humans Can Find Their True Innovative Selves
All Things Innovation: We have the pleasure of being with Mohan Nair, CEO of Emerge Inc., author, consultant, innovation expert. Thanks so much for coming on and talking with us about your latest book.
Mohan Nair: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be with you.
All Things Innovation: You’ve written a few books, and this new one really gets to the heart of the business community and even just society in general right now, with it being so AI driven. The book is called Unreachable, How Not to Lose Your Mind in an AI Obsessed Era. What inspired you to write Unreachable? Why do you believe this message is so critical in today’s environment?
Mohan Nair: The last book I wrote was in 2011, so you can imagine how long it took for me to formulate a thinking process for something to share with the world.It came to me because I was writing a book on innovation.And in that activity, the title of this book, innovation mojo, and that was going to be my sort of center of gravity about all the things I learned in innovation through the process of the last 20-plus years, especially since I’d worked in innovation during that period of time. I thought, could I capture the essence of it to serve the community of innovators?
But then this thing in 2017 turned up called GenAI, and it started to turn the world a little bit upside down.People started to formulate their own vision of what innovation looks like. It became much more ubiquitous. It became much more available to, shall I say, status quo individuals who could now innovate.
But the world broke up into two parts, people who are afraid of AI and then people who are obsessed with AI. I thought there would be a place in between that could really define where humans go when the so-called shores of AI start hitting the islands of our thinking. I wanted to write a book about humanity, basically, about how humans can find their true innovative self in the course of this fantastic, incredible introduction of the second brain that’s arriving.
Becoming AI Obsessed
All Things Innovation: It’s a fascinating subject, especially as the innovation and the market research professional have experimented with AI. You raised some of these points at the FEI conference in 2025, when you did a talk on cognitive atrophy, which is a risk when we allow AI to think for us. Can you elaborate on this concept and how you feel this might impact individuals?
Mohan Nair: The interesting thing is when you say I’m AI obsessed, what does that mean? I mean, I coined that term, so bear with me. I think it’s when you start to go for convenience over real inconvenient thinking. You go for the easy solution. You go for what’s good enough, and you go for the first opinion being given by the machine, not really yourself. Those three habits have a tendency to kind of remove your thinking from the normal cycle of how you work.
I started to investigate what this term cognitive atrophy applied to. What I was surprised was there was a number of research papers and research documentation that proved, at least not longitudinally, but in the short term, that people’s cognitive capacity atrophies with an overuse of LLMs. Now the atrophying with respect to cognition, with respect to search engines and Google have been documented many times. It’s called the Google effect.
There’s enough research that proves that overuse of search engines makes you feel a sense of informed cognition, but actually you forget within less than one minute what you found and what you’ve learned. So you have this perception of knowing, but then you lose out in the end. And that once you know where you search something, you tend not to remember it. That has been proven.
But now that substrate, that iPhone and that Google engine is now plugged into the Chrome engine or any other engine you want, plugged into your mental veins. Now we’re pouring in the ability for the machine to talk with you or sometimes over you. What happens then? Well, a Swiss business school, the school for cognition, the school for research, did an analysis with 600 candidates and found that the people who are undereducated in comparison to the overeducated people and the younger people, tended to cognitively offload when they use large language models.
When I mean offload, they let the machine think for them, and more and more, their brain was not firing. Further research studies and EEG studies of the brain indicate that an overuse of LLMs does not generate much networking going on in the brain. In other words, the way we know our brain is working is when it fires at multiple locations and triggering each other. That’s not happening as much.
When you put all that together, there is a danger, but I don’t want to be the warning label of AI. I’m a big fan. I’m an AI professional myself and started using AI since the eighties. So I’m not against it. I’m absolutely for it. But I’d like not to be the warning label. I’d like to be the nutrition label for Gen AI. But how do you not overdo it? How do you under fear it?
How do you use it so you find yourself in an AI enablement world where you are bringing your innovation self along with that? The atrophy part is a part of the book, but it really is to outline that an overuse could redefine you and your mental state.
Becoming Insight Empowered
All Things Innovation: You bring up so many good points, especially for innovation and market research where creative thinking, making business decisions, and being strategic are of prime importance. Can you talk a little bit of the balance between AI obsession and AI fear? What practical steps can individuals take to be insight powered and AI enabled?
Mohan Nair: I found the word insight to be very appealing as I was starting to write and develop this thinking for the last five years. I found it curious that there’s very minimal research on the idea of what is insightful.For innovators, that’s our currency. It’s not like just gathering data. It’s finding the source of that data being very powerful and then inciting that into an environment where you have a product or service that other people will purchase.
That word insight became sort of core to my thinking. Now your question is you call it the middle way. I think it’s the only way. I think that being insight powered and AI enabled may sound like a colloquium or a commentary I’m making that sounds good for books, but to be honest with you, it has literal meaning.
I think using the machine to find data is good for that. But the machine is not good in being able to create the yet to be created. The Airbnb’s of the world, the business designs we all think about, those are not fundamentally easy for a machine to understand unless it back annotates into the world of where it’s been before, what it’s been trained to do, and then it finds good combinatorial solutions that look like innovation. So if you’re an innovator that looks at old combinations and redoes them so it looks better, you probably will be replaced by a machine.
But if you are an innovator that is transformative and looking forward and looking for the next Airbnb, designing the next transformational business model or transformational idea into a scaffolding that others can climb, then I think you have the room to be AI enabled and insight driven, and the machine cannot reach you. For example, the machine could not have created Airbnb. It could not have created Tesla. It just could not have created those combinations that are yet to be created.
Let’s not mistake comprehension, which is what humans have, with combinatorial solutions that the machine is generating, which is an imitation of thinking, not thinking itself.
Creating Authentic ‘Aha’ Moments
All Things Innovation: You talked about the importance of the aha moments, the building and the scaffolding for transformational ideas. How can this help us thrive in the age of AI? Are these moments purely the human element?
Mohan Nair: You’re an innovator. Where do you get your ahas? Where do you suddenly get this physical reaction to an idea? When you laugh at a joke that is insightful, you tend to shake. Have you noticed your body moves? It’s a biological reaction when you laugh or when you find something new. You get excited. It’s all biology.
Machines cannot dream because they don’t sleep. In those sleeps, I get ideas. I wake up, and I take notes. I take a shower and discover something. I take a walk with a dog and I discover something. Where do you get your ahas?
All Things Innovation: Good question. Sometimes it could be when you’re offline doing something else and then that creativity hits. Oh, here’s an idea for a story. It could be just completely unrelated to what you’re doing at the time. That strikes me as being a very human aspect.
Mohan Nair: Correct. And that’s not found in the machine. The machine doesn’t know what an aha means. It will combinatorially produce outcomes for you.
In the science, in my research, I found a strong definition in the book called the cognitive neuroscience of insight. Surprisingly, there’s books on insight. And let me read you that so that it can give you a technical definition, which, frankly, it only says is for us humans. But for the technical, it’s any sudden comprehension, realization, or problem solution that involves a reorganization of the elements of a person’s mental representation of a stimulus situation or event to yield a nonobvious, nondominant interpretation.
That is the definition of insight. But in the field of insight, in the study of insight, it’s a trigger that comes when you go through a process of analytics. Your brain actually functions with a deepened understanding of something for a long period of time and then suddenly transported to another part of your brain that registers aha. So there’s a contemplative part of your brain, the analytic part, and then there’s the inside part of your brain. The combination creates the ability for you to have an insight.
In fMRI studies and EEG studies, they noticed that just before an insight hits, there’s a massive nonobvious spike of gamma beams that fire in your brain. And then right before it, there are nonobvious, millisecond firing of alpha beams that sort of shuts off all your senses. It shuts you for eyesight, hearing, and everything else. It’s almost like your brain is saying, I don’t want to hear anymore. I’ve got it. And then it sort of populates and something fires. In studies, they have discovered that that insight is registered somewhere on the right side of your brain, sort of three or four inches above your right ear.
But it registers. Now in asking neuroscientists, is that the source of where insight begins? Could I stimulate that location electrically and actually get insight? Could I reverse engineer it? Many of the neuroscientists I talked to could not explain it. They said, no. That’s where it’s registered in the brain, but we don’t know where the source is. We don’t know where our heart comes from.
And there lies my theory of work around it. It is biological. It generates through your spinal cord, your brain stem, your biologic, your molecular structure, your five thousand years of history in your body and your biology and your genetics. And all of that generates this, hey, I found out something, something I never really saw before that no one else could see long before it even arrived.
It’s like being able to throw a Frisbee on the beach, and the dog hasn’t been a friend yet, but the dog is going to catch it five years from now. That is the innovator’s dilemma and joy. It’s where you can throw something out in the sky that you know in your gut of guts that’s going to happen where all the data says otherwise.
But you have enough data and insight that powers it that creates a whole new scaffolding you build that others can conquer. That’s what the book is about. It’s about that incredible capacity for us to find the unfound when machines can deliver and document the death of ideas before.
Maintaining and Igniting Cognition
All Things Innovation: So this intersection of innovation and technology as you put, just can’t be separated between humans and AI. Let’s bring it back down to the innovation team or the insights market research team. What advice would you give to those leaders who are struggling to integrate AI into their operations?
Mohan Nair: First of all, I’m excited that they would. I think it has rapidly changed the art of insight generation, the art of innovation in our world. It’s accelerating things at a pace that usually people would think about something and go to engineering and say, can you prototype it? Now people are prototyping ideas by the hour, and it’s insane. Hackathons have got a different power source that’s unbelievable. I’m very excited about what it’s doing and what it can do.
But let’s just be really clear. Your cognition has to be maintained while you do it. If you really want to be cognitively powered, I suggest three things:
- Explore. Be an explorer, not an innovator. Because in this new world, innovation is about knowing. AI is about exploring. So you need to be designing your systems and whatever you do to explore continuously and experiment continuously. So I don’t call myself an expert anymore. I never did. I call myself an explorer now. I want people to understand that I’m in the learning curve just like you are. I may be two pages ahead, but so what? Explore with me.
- Realize that your first opinion is what creates your cognitive capacity. If you give away your first opinion to the machine, I know a number of people are saying, it’s hard for me to get started. I want to just tell the machine what the conditions are, then it can tell me how to think about this. I think that’s dangerous. I think that one should form an opinion. Even if it’s five minutes of sitting down, taking a pen to paper, writing down your thoughts, your cognitive sense of self will arrive very quickly. It’s incredibly plastic, and it has the ability to be able to generate itself very quickly. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. So write down your thoughts. Write down your statements. Write down your cognitive ideas and then test it against the machine. So let the machine be your second opinion. You’ll be the creator. It can be the editor. Don’t turn it around where you become the editor and it becomes the creator. By the way, most people notice when you do that. For something in our biology notices when it’s AI generated.
- It’s assumed that there are about six thousand thoughts you have in a day. And with caffeine, I guess it’s more than that, but let’s just say six thousand. Eighty percent of those thoughts seem to be negative, surprisingly. They’re about things that could go bad. They’re AI-fear related. And when you’re fearful, your brain doesn’t function to create. Realize that 80% of the time it’s doing status quo stuff. Seventy percent of the time, it’s repeat thinking. So think about the mathematics of this. Every day, 20% of your thoughts are really original. You want to pursue those. You want to create from those. When you know that, document it. Write down your thoughts. You have to measure. Because once your brain registers those thoughts, it recognizes itself and says, oh, I need to come up with more aha moments.
Let’s generate the conditions whereby those occur. So in your team, the innovation team that I ran for ten years as chief innovation officer, we created ten companies. We helped generate three thousand ideas, of which three of those ideas became multimillion dollar companies and are still functioning today. That wasn’t an accident. That was by the day to day work that we had, these ten people, where I would work with their cognition. I would work with their AI capacity. I would measure and study their cognitive strategy as well as their technology and business model strategy. I would maintain their cognition and grow it.
I would suggest you have an AI strategy, a technology strategy, as well as a business strategy, but also a cognitive strategy. How do you get your team to be cognitively more aligned, more capable, more innovative, and more transformative by the day? Grow them. And I did very funny things. I would break a meeting up right in the middle of the heat of a discussion and get them ice cream. It actually is cognitively positive. They start eating ice cream. They take a break. Their mental faculties turn on, and they come back with a boost that you had never seen before. I always wait for the moment where the team will energize themselves with everyone’s fighting for the pen to write an idea on the whiteboard, and I’d crack a joke. And they would get so tired of me.
But that joke would generate other jokes, and that humor, which is also proven cognitively to generate ideas, would create a sense of lateral thinking. This is not accidental. Everything I’m talking to you about is predictably possible and one can utilize it in the work of the day-to-day to create the tomorrow that has yet to exist.
All Things Innovation: Well, that’s a lot to think about. Talk about three thousand ideas in my head! But I take away that key point of facing your AI fear and to be the explorer as well. Mohan, thank you so much for coming here today, and talking about your new book, Unreachable: How Not to Lose Your Mind in an AI Obsessed Era.
Mohan Nair: My pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Keep innovating.
Editor’s Note: For more information about Unreachable by Mohan Nair, visit the Amazon book store.
Video: Interview with Mohan Nair courtesy of All Things Insights.
