Before you ask AI again, try some LMN

We talk a lot about AI literacy .. perhaps we now need to talk about AI recovery too. As AI becomes part of writing , coding , designing , researching and even thinking , our brains are receiving an extraordinary amount of assistance.

But it has side effects.

The more we outsource to AI , fewer opportunities we give our minds to wander , struggle , connect unrelated things and — occasionally surprise us.

That’s where I remembered my dear friend K B S Ramachandra who talked about LMN as a detox.

Literature .. Music .. Nature — not as entertainment, but as an AI detox for the mind.

[ L ] Literature : borrow someone else’s imagination
AI gives us answers but good literature gives us ambiguity. A novel makes us enter another person’s world , interpret motives and live with unanswered questions. Instead of asking AI to summarise those 300 pages , occasionally read some part of them. The inefficiency may actually be the point.
— literature stretches imagination.

[ M ] Music : let the brain work without words
Music doesn’t need a prompt or a follow-up question. A melody can trigger a memory , change a mood or create an association no carefully constructed prompt would have produced. In a world optimised for answers , music gives the mind permission to feel and wander.
— music resets emotion.

[ N ] Nature : put the algorithm on airplane mode
Walk without headphones .. watch the sea .. sit under a tree.
Look at something that hasn’t been personalised for you. Almost everything digital today is selected , ranked or recommended based on what an algorithm thinks we’ll like. Nature doesn’t know our browsing history!
— nature resets perspective.

And perhaps that’s why LMN becomes more important as AI gets better. AI learns our preferences , patterns and context and can inadvertently keep us inside comfortable cognitive boundaries .. LMN does the opposite.

– literature introduces another mind.
– music interrupts our thinking.
– nature removes the algorithm altogether.

Together, they create space for something increasingly precious — an unprompted thought.

I’m not suggesting we use AI less .. I’m suggesting we protect parts of our lives where we don’t use it. Creativity isn’t only about producing something. It’s about accumulating experiences from which something original can emerge.

If every blank page gets a prompt, every question gets an instant answer and every silence gets filled , we may become extraordinarily productive while slowly becoming less original. So ,
– read that wasn’t summarised for you.
– listen without doing anything else.
– walk somewhere without asking technology where to go.

As machines become increasingly capable of creating for us , we need to keep exercising the part of us that creates without them.

Until next time .. happy thinking!!

Author – Sumit Rajwade, Co-founder: mPrompto