This is ‘brain rot,’ a slang term with something to it

Content on your phone is designed to keep you scrolling. (AleksandarNakic/E+/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

You grab your phone and in that first swipe, you see someone traveling the world. Why aren’t you on vacation? Swipe again, and someone is living off the grid. Wow, shouldn’t you get rid of your laptop? Swipe once more, and a tech CEO is telling you how AI is going to optimize your hustle.

Does it feel like your brain is rotting away?

If it seems as though social media and online content are dragging you around instead of enriching your daily life, you probably relate to Tiziana Bucec, a content creator in Berlin whose social media posts combat a slang term that’s widely used online: “brain rot.”

“I’m making this series because I’m tired of feeling like social media makes us dumber, more anxious and less aware,” she said in her first anti-brain rot video, which then became a series on how social media use impacts the brain and how to moderate use.

Brain rot isn’t a scientific term. It has come to refer to content that might be funny nonsense, Bucec said. Think Skibidi Toilet or 6-7. But it has evolved into a popular way to complain that excessive use of social media has decreased critical thinking and attention span.

While there’s not much scientific research on brain rot and its possible effects, we can use knowledge about the brain and addiction to infer some possibilities, said Dr. Costantino Iadecola, Anne Parrish Titzell Professor of Neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine and director and chair of the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute.

The mechanisms that keep you mindlessly scrolling may be similar to those behind addictions such as drug and alcohol use or gambling. In teens diagnosed with internet addiction, past research has found disrupted signaling between brain regions important for controlling attention, working memory and more. It’s reasonable to expect that the amount of time people spend mindlessly engaging with low-quality content, or brain rot, can have detrimental effects, Iadecola said.

What makes content low quality?

The main culprit of brain rot is low-quality content, which often refers to short-term videos, like those funny cat compilations or that teen doing a viral dance, said Dr. Nidhi Gupta, a pediatric endocrinologist in Franklin, Tennessee, and author of “Calm the Noise: Why Adults Must Escape Digital Addiction to Save the Next Generation.”

“Our attention spans are finite, and when we have so much content competing for our attention span, something essential is going to be missed, whether it is health, whether it is work, relationships or sleep,” Gupta said. “We download that low-quality digital media, that digital noise, into our brain space.”

Short-form content, whether it’s watching someone try on outfits or prank their partner, is designed to give you a big hit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for reward and motivation, and get you to keep coming back, Iadecola said.

Often, but not always, that content isn’t helping the viewer learn, grow or develop, he added.

Watching a lot of it can prime a brain to expect frequent and explosive bursts of excitement, which can make longer and more deeply engaging forms of media feel boring and inadequate, Gupta said.

Not just a kid problem

Iadecola is most concerned for kids when it comes to brain rot, he said.

As with other addictions, there are ways to address excessive social media use and change a bad habit throughout your life, he added. But young children who are glued to a device, rather than running around on a playground learning to interact with people, may be missing key milestones.

As children develop, they need a lot of different experiences to form a brain that can learn and develop productively, including emotional, social and facial cues, Iadecola said.

Spending so much time with short-form content is “kind of fast pacing and not really teaching you something that may be useful in the long term, which will eventually affect your ability to learn, and so you’re going to be at a disadvantage,” he noted.

But helping children have a healthy relationship with social media also can mean examining how adults use it, too.

“Screen addiction is not a kid problem anymore. It is a human problem,” Gupta said.

“We as human beings are being role models for kids,” she added. “When we are reaching for our phone while driving, we are silently sending a message in the back seat toward children that it’s OK to do this. So, when they get behind the wheel, they are likely to follow suit.”

Modeling behavior for children is often more effective than lecturing them about what they should –– or should not –– be doing, Gupta added.

Can you still tune it out?

If you’re worried about compilations, fan edits and other lower-quality content, it can be tempting to try to ban it from your feeds and those of the kids you may have in your life. That might not be the answer, though.

When teens use the term brain rot, it’s an acknowledgment that they are letting their minds not be utilized fully, which is easy to bristle at, said Dr. Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist in Ohio and author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable and Compassionate Adolescents.”

But many of today’s teens are doing more work in school than earlier generations, and every generation has had their ways to disengage that adults in their lives might not have preferred, she added.

“I myself watched a ton of ‘Gilligan’s Island,’” Damour said. “As long as kids are accomplishing the things they need to, being good citizens all around, they absolutely deserve some mindless leisure.”

Want to set limits?

Social media can have benefits for adults, so the goal shouldn’t be complete elimination for everyone, said Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how digital media affects our lives.

“Set limits if you’re such a person that goes down rabbit holes (and) can spend hours on social media,” she said.

Limits can look like setting up a daily time slot to check in with your social media platforms that happens right before something you have to do so you can’t keep scrolling without end, Gupta said.

In addition to limits, deleting the applications and only accessing social media through a browser may also help moderate social media use –– and the potential brain rot, she added. Using it that way puts more effort between you and a scroll, and a browser version is usually less set up to be addictive than an application, she said.

“Willpower does not work,” Gupta said. “Environmental changes matter more.”

Need a little more motivation to cut down? Now is the time to formulate New Year’s resolutions, and you can start by reducing your consumption or making a plan to set limits come January.

By Madeline Holcombe, CNN