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While some Barcelona residents sought to repel a tsunami of tourists with plastic water pistols, a neighborhood association in Santiago de Compostela opted for a friendlier approach: a guide to good manners for visitors to their town, the endpoint of the Catholic world’s most famous pilgrimage. Translated into several languages, the group posted it throughout the northwestern Spanish city and distributed it at its ever-growing number of hostels. It reminded tourists to keep noise down, respect traffic rules and use plastic protectors on hiking poles to avoid damaging the narrow cobblestone streets, among other things. To little avail, it would seem. Large groups still take over the streets singing hymns, bikes ride in the wrong direction and metal pole tips clatter against the ground. Santiago’s social media is awash with photos denouncing a lack of decorum. Tourists’ greater offense, though, stems from their sheer numbers; the old town and squares surrounding the cathedral holding the reputed tomb of Saint James the Apostle and that was the center of town life for a millennium today are almost exclusively the domain of outsiders, whose influx has served to expel residents. This dynamic has left Santiago emerging as the latest global destination where longtime residents have grown embittered by the overtourism transforming their community. We do not have tourism-phobia. We have always lived in harmony with tourism, but when it gets out of hand, when the pressure goes beyond what is reasonable, that is when rejection arises, said Roberto Almuía, president of the neighborhood association in the old town that’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Scenery for visitors The Camino de Santiago, known in English as the Way of St. James, dates back to the 9th century, with pilgrims following its converging trails for up to hundreds of kilometers on paths originating in Portugal and France. The modern popularity it gained with the 2010 film The Way starring Martin Sheen was turbocharged more recently by social media and experience-driven travel after the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, a record half-million people signed up to trek one of the approved routes to the cathedral equal to five times the citys resident population, and marking a 725-fold increase over the last four decades. Added to those masses are ordinary tourists not arriving by trail. The proliferation of short-term rentals drove annual rent prices up 44% from 2018 to 2023, according to a study commissioned by the city council to the Fundación Universidade da Corua. That led municipal authorities in May to request the regional government classify the area as a high-pressure zone, like Barcelona or San Sebastian, which would help to limit rent increases. Already, last November, Santiago’s city council enacted a ban on Airbnb-style tourist accommodations in the historic center, arguing at the time in a statement that it was a necessity arising from its significant growth, which has clear effects on the number of housing units available for residents and on their price. Sihara Pérez, a researcher at the University of Santiago, described finding anywhere to rent in the city as mission impossible, while Antonio Jeremías, 27, told The Associated Press that he’s considering moving back in with his mother, because his salary working full-time at a warehouse isnt enough to make ends meet. Andrea Dopazo, 32, tried to move out of her parents house in a neighborhood located fully 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the city center. But her desire to continue living in the place where she grew up and community ties are strong proved futile, and she had to take something in a town outside Santiago. The only people who have been able to stay in the neighborhoods are those who have been lucky or unlucky enough to inherit an apartment from their grandparents, uncles or parents, said Dopazo, who works in human resources. Across Spain, there have been major street protests against unaffordable housing, with many linking the housing crunch to tourists gobbling up short-term rentals. Breaking the rules In the old town, tourists can stay in small hotels in former homes or huge hostels converted from former seminaries, which arent subject to the ban. But in the hustle to cash in, some short-term rentals are apparently flouting the restriction, evidenced by tenants collecting keys from lockboxes hung outside buildings. Some follow the rules and others dont, but this is the model that is really limiting residential housing, said Montse Vilar, from another neighborhood group, Xuntanza. Santiagos City Hall told The Associated Press in a statement that it is doing everything in its power to enforce the regulations and that it takes action whenever it detects a case of an illegal apartment housing tourists. Between 2000 and 2020, the historic center lost about half its permanent population, now reduced to just 3,000 residents who resist like the Gauls behind buildings’ thick stone facades, Almuía said. There are no hardware stores or newsstands left, and just one bakery. A couple grocery stores coexist with cafes, ice cream parlors and souvenir shops. The city has emptied out. You only have to take a walk to see that all we’ve got are closed, abandoned buildings that are falling apart, Almuía added. Spirituality This year, the number of pilgrims reaching Santiago is on track to set another record. The surge is further souring Santiago’s residents on their city’s tourism-centric economic model; already half of them rejected it as of 2023, up from just over one-quarter a decade earlier, according to a study conducted by Rede Galabra, a research group focused on cultural studies at the University of Santiago. Even some of the pilgrims are noting a shift, like Spaniards Álvaro Castao and Ale Osteso who met on the route four years ago and have returned every year since. The Camino is becoming more and more known, many more people are coming, Osteso said one recent morning at the end of their trek, among tour groups of pilgrims in bright, color-coordinated outfits and families snapping pictures. Spirituality seems to have been a little lost at times. Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. Teresa Medrano, Associated Press
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Everywhere I go in the world to speak or advise companies, I hear the same complaint: No one listens to my ideas. I hear it from young professionals trying to launch their careers, mid-career managers navigating internal politics, and even senior leaders struggling to steer their organizations in a new direction. We like to believe that good ideas rise to the top, that if something is smart or right, people will naturally get behind it. But history shows thats not true. From antiseptics and cancer immunotherapy to Chester Carlsons Xerox machine, even the most breakthrough ideas faced fierce resistance. Countless others never saw the light of day. As the computing pioneer Howard Aiken put it, Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. Getting traction has less to do with persuasion or even the importance of the idea itself than it has to do with power. If you want your ideas to have an impact, you need to learn how to build influence.
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When OpenAI released study mode in July 2025, the company touted ChatGPTs educational benefits. When ChatGPT is prompted to teach or tutor, it can significantly improve academic performance, the companys vice president of education told reporters at the products launch. But any dedicated teacher would be right to wonder: Is this just marketing, or does scholarly research really support such claims? While generative AI tools are moving into classrooms at lightning speed, robust research on the question at hand hasnt moved nearly as fast. Some early studies have shown benefits for certain groups such as computer programming students and English language learners. And there have been a number of other optimistic studies on AI in education, such as one published in the journal Nature in May 2025 suggesting that chatbots may aid learning and higher-order thinking. But scholars in the field have pointed to significant methodological weaknesses in many of these research papers. Other studies have painted a grimmer picture, suggesting that AI may impair performance or cognitive abilities such as critical thinking skills. One paper showed that the more a student used ChatGPT while learning, the worse they did later on similar tasks when ChatGPT wasnt available. In other words, early research is only beginning to scratch the surface of how this technology will truly affect learning and cognition in the long run. Where else can we look for clues? As a cognitive psychologist who has studied how college students are using AI, I have found that my field offers valuable guidance for identifying when AI can be a brain booster and when it risks becoming a brain drain. Skill comes from effort Cognitive psychologists have argued that our thoughts and decisions are the result of two processing modes, commonly denoted as System 1 and System 2. The former is a system of pattern matching, intuition and habit. It is fast and automatic, requiring little conscious attention or cognitive effort. Many of our routine daily activitiesgetting dressed, making coffee and riding a bike to work or schoolfall into this category. System 2, on the other hand, is generally slow and deliberate, requiring more conscious attention and sometimes painful cognitive effort, but often yields more robust outputs. We need both of these systems, but gaining knowledge and mastering new skills depend heavily on System 2. Struggle, friction and mental effort are crucial to the cognitive work of learning, remembering and strengthening connections in the brain. Every time a confident cyclist gets on a bike, they rely on the hard-won pattern recognition in their System 1 that they previously built up through many hours of effortful System 2 work spent learning to ride. You dont get mastery and you cant chunk information efficiently for higher-level processing without first putting in the cognitive effort and strain. I tell my students the brain is a lot like a muscle: It takes genuine hard work to see gains. Without challenging that muscle, it wont grow bigger. What if a machine does the work for you? Now imagine a robot that accompanies you to the gym and lifts the weights for you, no strain needed on your part. Before long, your own muscles will have atrophied and youll become reliant on the robot at home even for simple tasks like moving a heavy box. AI, used poorlyto complete a quiz or write an essay, saylets students bypass the very thing they need to develop knowledge and skills. It takes away the mental workout. Using technology to effectively offload cognitive workouts can have a detrimental effect on learning and memory and can cause people to misread their own understanding or abilities, leading to what psychologists call metacognitive errors. Research has shown that habitually offloading car navigation to GPS may impair spatial memory and that using an external source like Google to answer questions makes people overconfident in their own personal knowledge and memory. Learning and mastery come from effort, whether thats done with a powerful chatbot or AI tutor or not, but educators and students need to resist outsourcing that work. Francesco Carta fotografo via Getty Images Are there similar risks when students hand off cognitive tasks to AI? One study found that students researching a topic using ChatGPT instead of a traditional web search had lower cognitive load during the taskthey didnt have to think as hardand produced worse reasoning about the topic they had researched. Surface-level use of AI may mean less cognitive burden in the moment, but this is akin to letting a robot do your gym workout for you. It ultimately leads to poorer thinking skills. In another study, students using AI to revise their essays scored higher than those revising without AI, often by simply copying and pasting sentences from ChatGPT. But these students showed no more actual knowledge gain or knowledge transfer than their peers who worked without it. The AI group also engaged in fewer rigorous System 2 thinking processes. The authors warn that such metacognitive laziness may prompt short-term performance improvements but also lead to the stagnation of long-term skills. Offloading can be useful once foundations are in place. But those fondations cant be formed unless your brain does the initial work necessary to encode, connect and understand the issues youre trying to master. Using AI to support learning Returning to the gym metaphor, it may be useful for students to think of AI as a personal trainer who can keep them on task by tracking and scaffolding learning and pushing them to work harder. AI has great potential as a scalable learning tool, an individualized tutor with a vast knowledge base that never sleeps. AI technology companies are seeking to design just that: the ultimate tutor. In addition to OpenAIs entry into education, in April 2025 Anthropic released its learning mode for Claude. These models are supposed to engage in Socratic dialogue, to pose questions and provide hints, rather than just giving the answers. Early research indicates AI tutors can be beneficial but introduce problems as well. For example, one study found high school students reviewing math with ChatGPT performed worse than students who didnt use AI. Some students used the base version and others a customized tutor version that gave hints without revealing answers. When students took an exam later without AI access, those whod used base ChatGPT did much worse than a group whod studied without AI, yet they didnt realize their performance was worse. Those whod studied with the tutor bot did no better than students whod reviewed without AI, but they mistakenly thought they had done better. So AI didnt help, and it introduced metacognitive errors. Even as tutor modes are refined and improved, students have to actively select that mode and, for now, also have to play along, deftly providing context and guiding the chatbot away from worthless, low-level questions or sycophancy. The latter issues may be fixed with better design, system prompts and custom interfaces. But the temptation of using default-mode AI to avoid hard work will continue to be a more fundamental and classic problem of teaching, course design and motivating students to avoid shortcuts that undermine their cognitive workout. As with other complex technologies such as smartphones, the internet or even writing itself, it will take more time for researchers to fully understand the true range of AIs effects on cognition and learning. In the end, the picture will likely be a nuanced one that depends heavily on context and use case. But what we know about learning tells us that deep knowledge and mastery of a skill will always require a genuine cognitive workoutwith or without AI. Brian W. Stone is an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Boise State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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