It’s quite a motherly phrase to hear that being in front of your phone all the time watching TikTok or playing the video game console has a very clear effect on the brain and that it ‘rots’. In English, this is something that is known as ‘brain rot’ and refers to this lightheadedness after several hours in front of screens, and science has now begun to take this concept as something very important and not like an internet meme.
Its meaning. This concept related to the brain ‘rotting’ refers to the cognitive deterioration and mental exhaustion that people suffer, especially in adolescents and young adults, due to excessive exposure to low-quality online material. And although this started as a meme, it is today a neurocognitive syndrome confirmed by institutions like the American Psychological Association, where it has been seen that the brain is literally getting smaller.
The dopamine trap. The design of short video platforms like TikTok it’s not accidentalbut it is created to retain the user’s attention so that they do not stop sliding the screen down. And it is something that is very well studied, since, as interaction on these social platforms increases, so does the brain’s need to receive a dopamine rush. It literally creates a dependency.
Doomscrolling. This system in our brain, driven by dopamine, encourages a never-ending cycle of consumption, which has given rise to terms like ‘Doomscrolling‘ which is the compulsive action of scrolling through social media feeds focused on negative information or distressing. And this, rather than generating rejection, causes us to be in a state of hypervigilance linked to high levels of anxiety, stress and cognitive fatigue.
There is also another concept quite important in the world of social networks such as ‘Zombie scrolling’, which consists of passively scrolling through social networks without any purpose or objective. In this way, this mentally absent consumption reduces the brain’s ability to maintain sustained attention.
Brain effect. The act of constantly scrolling on the screen is something that has been widely studied today and points to measurable neurological consequences. What has been seen here is that the brain experience cognitive overload when you try to process the constant flow of fragmented information, with topics that are really disparate from one video to the next, making you not have time to process the first before starting to watch the second.
Its consequences. Research published in Addictive Behaviors they point out that compulsive cell phone use reduces the volume of gray matter in key areas for empathy, memory and self-regulation. This means that literally the brain is reducing its size with the passage of time due to the fact of being like a zombie browsing TikTok all day.
In addition to this, science has seen that addiction to short videos increases activity in reward and emotion regions, causing structural differences in the frontal cortex and increasing impulsivity. Something that adds to the memory impairmentfailures in long-term retention and also at a worse attention performance.
How to avoid it. As alarming as this may seem, we must remember that we have brain neuroplasticity on our side to be able to reverse these effects. In this way, there are several strategies to mitigate the fact that the brain begins to be greatly affected by being on social networks for a large number of hours.
One of the tips is undoubtedly to reduce the time we spend in front of the screen to reduce cognitive overload. Furthermore, stopping following accounts that provoke negative emotions and looking for environments that are positive or friendlier to avoid anxiety is something we should get used to in our daily lives.
Images | Hoi An and Da Nang
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