Brain rot

A 170-year-old word

Oxford defines brain rot 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."¹ The first recorded use is Henry David Thoreau in Walden, published in 1854, complaining that society preferred easy ideas to hard ones. Today it's used mostly by the people it's supposedly happening to: Gen Z and Gen Alpha, half joking, about the hours lost to short videos.

The word "supposed" in the definition is doing honest work. Nothing rots. What changes is what your attention practises.

What the research supports

Attention is trainable, in both directions

Attention on screens has shortened steadily in every measurement Gloria Mark's lab has taken since 2004: from an average of two and a half minutes on one screen to 47 seconds.² Short-form video is the purest form of this: a new clip every few seconds, chosen by a system that has watched what holds you. Practising that rhythm for hours makes slower rhythms, a chapter, a lecture, a conversation, feel effortful. That's not damage. It's the same plasticity that lets you get it back.

Media multitasking is linked to worse working memory

People who habitually consume several media streams at once perform worse, on average, on laboratory tests of sustained attention and working memory. A 2018 review in PNAS found this association reliable across studies, while noting that whether the multitasking causes the deficit, or people with weaker attention drift into multitasking, is unresolved.³

The internet changes how we remember

When information is a search away, we're more likely to remember where to find something than the thing itself. The World Psychiatry review calls this the "online brain": constant small rewards that fragment attention, and outsourced memory that changes how knowledge is stored.⁴ Whether that's a loss or a trade depends on what you need to know without a phone in hand.

The mere presence of the phone has a cost

Even unused, a phone on the desk lowered working-memory and fluid-intelligence scores in two experiments with almost 800 people; the effect was largest in those who felt most dependent on the phone.⁵

What it doesn't support

• Permanent damage in adults. There is no evidence that ordinary phone use causes lasting structural harm to an adult brain. The measurable effects are on attention, sleep and mood, and they move when behaviour moves.
• A single cause. Studies that look like they show screens harming children are almost all cross-sectional: they show that children who use more screens differ on average, not what caused the difference.⁶ Household, temperament and lost sleep are all in the mix.
• That intelligence is falling. Feeling foggy after two hours of clips is real; it's the residue of rapid task switching and often of lost sleep. It lifts.

Why short video hits hardest

Three things stack. The clips are short, so each one is a fresh chance at a hit. The order is chosen by a recommendation system tuned on your own behaviour, so the hits get more frequent the longer you watch. And there's no end: no episode count, no last page. Add colour, sound and motion, the strongest possible sensory package, and you have the most effective attention-capture format ever built. Feeling flattened after it is not a personal failing.

Getting your attention back

1. Block the format, not the app. Most people need messaging and a few features of YouTube or Instagram; they don't need Shorts or Reels. Offly can block just the short-video parts of an app, so the useful bits stay.
2. Turn colour off. Greyscale removed about 38 minutes a day of screen time in a randomised trial, most of it social and browsing.⁷ Video in black and white is far less magnetic.
3. Add a pause you can skip. An escapable wait before opening an app cut opens by 36% over six weeks.⁸
4. Practise the long thing. Twenty minutes with a book or a podcast at a set time each day is the direct counter-training. It will feel slow for a week or two. That feeling is the point.
5. Move the phone. For focused work, put it in another room. The brain-drain result is the cheapest gain in this list.⁵
6. Protect sleep. Most "brain rot" is partly sleep debt. The evidence on bedtime screens is the strongest in this whole field.⁹

Sources

1. Oxford University Press (2024). 'Brain rot' named Oxford Word of the Year 2024. corp.oup.com
2. Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span. Hanover Square Press. Interview summary at apa.org
3. Uncapher, M. R., & Wagner, A. D. (2018). Minds and brains of media multitaskers: current findings and future directions. PNAS, 115(40), 9889–9896. pnas.org
4. Firth, J., et al. (2019). The "online brain": how the Internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry, 18(2), 119–129. wiley.com
5. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: the mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154. journals.uchicago.edu
6. Hutton, J. S., et al. (2020). Associations between screen-based media use and brain white matter integrity in preschool-aged children. JAMA Pediatrics, 174(1). jamanetwork.com
7. Holte, A. J., & Ferraro, F. R. (2020). True colors: grayscale setting reduces screen time in college students. The Social Science Journal. tandfonline.com
8. Grüning, D. J., Riedel, F., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2023). Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec. PNAS, 120(8). pnas.org
9. Carter, B., et al. (2016). Association between portable screen-based media device access or use and sleep outcomes. JAMA Pediatrics, 170(12), 1202–1208. jamanetwork.com

This article is for general information and is not medical advice.