‘Brain rot’ is the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year – a fitting choice, given the startling impact the internet is having on our grey matter.
‘Stanford University found that people who frequently engaged with multiple online platforms have reduced memory and attention spans.’ Photograph: artiemedvedev/Getty Images/iStockphoto
If you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and type the words “skibidi toilet” into YouTube. The 11-second video features an animated human head protruding from a toilet bowl while singing the nonsensical lyrics “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes”. The clip has been viewed more than 215m times, and spawned hundreds of millions of references on TikTok and other social media.
Fitting, then, that the Oxford English Dictionary has just announced “brain rot” as its word of year. As an abstract concept, brain rot is something we’re all vaguely aware of. The dictionary defines it as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging”. But few people are aware of how literally technology is rotting our brains, and how decisively compulsive internet use is destroying our grey matter.
Brain rot was portended almost 20 years ago when scientists studied the effects of a new invention called “email”, specifically the impact a relentless barrage of information would have on participants’ brains. The results? Constant cognitive overload had a more negative effect than taking cannabis, with IQs of participants dropping an average of 10 points.
And this was prior to smartphones bringing the internet to our fingertips, which has resulted in the average UK adult now spending at least four hours a day online (with gen Z men spending five and a half hours a day online, and gen Z women six and a half).
In recent years, an abundance of academic research from institutions including Harvard medical school, the University of Oxford and King’s College London found evidence that the internet is shrinking our grey matter, shortening attention spans, weakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The areas of the brain found to be affected included “attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources”, “memory processes” and “social cognition”.
Paper after paper spells out how vulnerable we are to internet-induced brain rot. “High levels of internet usage and heavy media multitasking are associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions,” finds one. People with internet addiction exhibit “structural brain changes” and “reduced grey matter”. Too much technology during brain developmental years has even been referred to by some academics as risking “digital dementia”.
In 2018, a decade of data analysed by leading memory psychologists at Stanford University found that people who frequently engaged with multiple online platforms have reduced memory and attention spans.
And yet we seem to be doing very little to stem the tide. Earl Miller, an MIT neuroscientist and world expert on divided attention, warned in 2022 that we are now living in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. Dr Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has found evidence of how drastically our ability to focus is waning. In 2004, her team of researchers found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. This “is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society”, she told a podcast in 2023.
But we’re not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate us totally. Silicon Valley’s dirtiest design feature – which is everywhere once you spot it – is the infinite scroll, likened to the “bottomless soup bowl” experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a soup bowl if it keeps refilling. An online feed that constantly “refills” manipulates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven loops of endless “seeking” can become addictive.
What will happen if we don’t get a handle on our declining cognitive health? The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris told US Congress in 2019 that billions of people – “a psychological footprint about the size of Christianity” – now receive their information from platforms whose business model “links their profit to how much attention they capture, creating a ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’ to extract attention by hacking lower into our lizard brains – into dopamine, fear, outrage – to win”.
His warnings are about as stark as they come. “Persuasive technology is a massively underestimated and powerful force shaping the world,” he said. “It has taken control of the pen of human history, which will drive us to catastrophe if we don’t take it back.”
The term brain rot was popularised online by young people who are most at risk of its effects. The fact that those who are most at risk have the most self-awareness of the problem is heartening news. The first step towards any change is understanding the problem. And there is cause to be hopeful. In recent years, anti-technology movements have gained traction, from teenagers turning to dumbphones to campaigns for a smartphone-free childhood; green shoots for a future in which we are able to reclaim our minds. So perhaps there’s more poignant meaning to Skibidi Toilet, after all: an awareness of where human intelligence currently sits. It can now go in one of two directions: up, or round the U-bend.
Siân Boyle is a freelance journalist
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