intellectual work (or really any discipline with a 'skills tree' that you can progress up or down) degrades over time without practice. same way that, if you don't run for a while, you're not going to be able to hit your last PR when you pick it back up.

it's definitely easier to catch up after some time away than it would be if you'd never developed the skills in the first place or didn't have a natural talent, but you'll definitely atrophy without exercise. every leader i've ever worked for who graduated to a purely managerial/'strategic' position and didn't keep up their IC skills eventually got pretty slow on the uptake.

i appreciate that this study was done (AI and its inverse relationship to human wellbeing is one of the biggest challenges of our time IMO) but this also seems obvious