Interpreting fMRI results like this article does is almost always wrong. Different activities produce different patterns of brain activity. You could put someone in an fMRI machine, have them do virtually any activity, and then write a headline saying that doing that activity turns of key brain regions that are important for something. The trick is that all brain regions are important for something. Having them be less active during a task doesn't imply that it's good or bad. It just shows you which parts of the brain are involved in that task.
This blogspam article isn't great. The study at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192... has more details, like the fact that those brain regions come online while viewing other less-preferred videos. The results aren't really indicative of anything by themself. It would have been more interesting if they compared to something, like watching a long involved movie or playing video games, but they didn't.
I haven’t read the study, but I’ve read the comments so far.
I wonder if this mechanism is the same mechanism that impacts, say, swipe-focused dating websites, as well? And Twitter feeds with super-short messages. A lot of the most viral modern tech has been bite-sized content feeds of various types.
> "Matt Mayberry, who works at a California startup called Dopamine Labs, says it's common knowledge in the industry that Instagram exploits this craving by strategically withholding "likes" from certain users. If the photo-sharing app decides you need to use the service more often, it'll show only a fraction of the likes you've received on a given post at first, hoping you'll be disappointed with your haul and check back again in a minute or two."
(Dopamine Labs is now boundless.ai, only one example, the reward hacking mentioned is everywhere in socials, adult content, sports betting, for reward maxxing)
Either the person was making something up, or he just didn't understand how hyperscale apps work toward eventual consistency rather than having everything propagated the instant you press the button.
I think that should be illegal. I don’t know how to legislate it in a way that makes sense and actually accomplishes the goal (or if that’s even possible), but I would support someone trying to figure it out.
Full social media ban, problem solved. There’s no point wasting more time discussing these things when they’re very obviously a large net negative on society.
It's about the same amount of time that attention is given to any focus, most of those are less than a SFV length.
It really makes sense now. Emotional dysregulation comes into play and now I wonder that it's not just me who is quietly angry (at Match Group) all the time while still addicted to swipe based dating apps.
Coincides with GenZ aging into adulthood after being educated in the debunked "3-cueing" or "whole language" reading education model. So far 40 states have pivoted away from it as states that switched first saw reading comprehension improve.
Whole lot of social experimentation without informed consent being put on people by 50+ year olds who run the world and never had to jump through the same thought policing.
It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.
It's a lot worse. It's like comparing a bow and arrow to an M-16. Yes they both shoot projectiles, but...
The quantity is endless. You can run out of channels, sweep through them a few times, give up, and get bored, while doom scrollers give you an infinite stream of faux-novelty. It's entirely possible to scroll for eternity and never run out of what at least seems, to your limbic system, like information and social stimulation.
The content is generally much lower quality than TV. Even really bad dumb TV is high art compared to a lot of what's on the doom scrollers. It's hyper-optimized for narrow addictiveness and literally nothing else.
There's a closed feedback loop optimization system in place. The site knows you're scrolling. It knows how fast, where you pause, in some cases even where your eyeballs are going. It knows what makes you interact. It knows what you watched before you stopped watching vs what you watched and kept watching. It also has tons of third party data on you and sensor data that often even includes your location. It can optimize its addiction mechanism in a personalized rapid feedback closed loop way that television could never achieve.
It's like a smart drug that tries to keep you hooked. Imagine if the heroin had a learning algorithm that adapted its chemical structure in real time to keep you from quitting and it was powered by fleet-wide learning cross all heroin molecules in the world.
I get the TikTok addiction, but before that it was fb, before that was the tv, before that the newspaper/magazines, before that the books, before that table games etc
I don’t know it seems that regardless of the technology the brain needs dozing off from reality.
The hyper normalization on technology fueled escapism is the difference.
Everyone had freedom to pick their poison so to speak. Now? All tech and screen based.
Hyper-social normalization always falls apart. It's unnatural; modern human biology evolved for thousands solving problems mostly in isolation. Tech fueled distribution of material goods humans need to survive is great as it removed risk to biology. But social normalization sucks.
Whether the socialized motive is appease gods by living up to scripture, keep a job/build career make money, or validate it just normalizes people and if we all know the same shit, why discuss anything with them? We already know the same shit.
I think there is something distinctly unique between dozing off from reality by letting your mind wander or twiddling your thumbs, and scrolling short form video.
In my personal experience short form content is easier to get sucked into for hours on end than those other ones and something I’m more likely to regret participating in. (Learning this early I stopped so I’m not the biggest consumer of it and may have an atypical opinion compared to 1-2 billion people actively watching tik tok for hours a day.)
Hmm... this doesn't quite add up. Do we have brain scans showing that critical thinking centers of the brain turn off when people read books or play table games?
Exactly, should the "control regions" being deactivated be something that is activated all the time, or is that associated with burnout, or chronic stress?
Today I found out that half my traffic on my apps are coming from bots. I am considering leaving the online world. Its becoming a hostile unpleasant place. This article report only fuels my devotion.
Worthwhile to note that “TikTok” here just means the format, not the platform. YouTube has its “shorts”, Facebook, insta, X, et all engage heavily in milking your doom scrolled eyeballs for time and profit.
I uninstalled basically all of these EXCEPT youtube, and that's what I struggle with sometimes now. I find so much great long- and medium-form content on Youtube that I want to keep it around. But I have to admit that I can sometimes fall down a time-wasting rabbit hole with shorts.
The Youtube app now has a "shorts feed limit" under "time management" that will limit your access to the auto-scroll shorts feed to a certain amount per day. Worth checking out!
By putting AI into every product I think Google has made a tactical error on YouTube, since the “summarize it this video” feature is helping me spend far less time watching rage bait political content.
The brain is incredibly energy hungry so it evolved to detect situations that don’t require full attention and activates the Default Mode Network. This happens when you’re zoning out to pretty much anything, and indicates that you’re essentially in “low power mode”.
My question here is whether the framing of the content in question “shutting off brain regions” is an honest one compared to what I said above. fMRI is amazing to be sure, but what it tells us is limited.
So without endorsing crap content on any way, I’m very skeptical of this article’s conclusions based on the study in question.
I would postulate that it's even worse than this, given that default mode network activity is proven to be essential for a healthy mind. This is when engage in useful thinking even when we're not "doing anything".
I think screen activity/tiktok keeps us in some kind of purgatory where we can neither fully engage nor fully disengage.
This "low power mode" is a myth, the brain pulls a pretty constant amount of power (about 20% of metabolic energy), and most power isn't consumed by the action potential/neurons firing, but rather in keeping the neuron ready to fire.
And the regions involved in the default mode network are actually some of the metabolically most active regions in the brain, involved in memory consolidation, future simulation, theory of mind, and self-narrative; among other things.
This framing seems like the correct one, but I think that just like being physically sedentary leads to weakness of muscles and joints and health problems, so being mentally sedentary could also lead to a mind that is weakened in the long term, though the weakness could likely be reversed with exposure to exercise.
"The researchers caution against reading the deactivation as evidence of impaired cognitive function. As they put it in the paper, “this deactivation should not be interpreted as a failure of cognitive control capacity.” Instead, the team argues the pattern likely reflects an adaptive shift toward low-effort, automatic processing during passive, low-conflict viewing."
my take: if the study authors could qualify a subject's liked videos, they could qualify a subject's liked activities, and study activation thresholds prior to and post short form content exposure. this would provide a better substrate from which to draw such conclusions.
but I don't need a study to tell me that short form content fries the brain ... it fries my brain!
the linked study effectively drills down on aspects of previous work ...
"High-frequency SFV [short form video] use was consistently associated with attentional disruption, reduced executive functioning, and emotional dysregulation."
"Neuroimaging results revealed reduced activation in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) and Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) regions ... when participants viewed personalised TikTok videos."
"(The ACC) is involved in ... higher-level functions, such as attention allocation, reward anticipation, decision-making, impulse control
.. and emotion."
by permitting unlimited short form content and not disallowing child access we are allowing corporations to destroy kids brains. therefore I posit the latest generation has been rendered retarded, which will pose a dire threat to continued stability unless addressed.
very worrying study, essentially its a digital->neurochemistry chasm crossing substance that uses the 2 senses.
all more reasons to heavily discourage the usage of short form content , we might require regulations against what is essentially an invisible drug that rapidly replicate and distribute itself among the masses.
Full social media ban would be easier and more effective imo. Public spaces would come back to life in no time at all if social media was heavily curtailed or banned entirely. This would be an obvious win for everyone involved outside of the terminally online and corporations benefiting from their lack of self control.
define short form content as anything under an arbitrary time threshold, legislate all online providers of short form content to mandate an arbitrary time limit per day for all users, add a law that parents knowingly allowing children to exceed national daily short form content limits are subject to penalty. seems fairly straightforward. but uh, I guess we could all capitulate to giving corporations our biometric data ...
How about anything that tracks the user's behavior and changes its output based on that behavior specific to that user. If I have a table somewhere in my software that identifies a user and references behavior, not intentional settings, just behavior and that is used to determine what the software does. Make that illegal and a lot of problems go away. To me it is this feedback loop that is insidious.
Let me add, it sound very much like 3D-prohibition for guns. The total demonization of anything, because it could be bad, given certain conditions, is a recipe for disaster. As you say, is extremely difficult to define where are the limits, and the extremely hard to apply the limits without screwing over millions.
study each proposed form of short form content regarding impact on cognitive function and select the most destructive forms for legislation.
if you make a website that provides short form content you are subject. why would an aggregator be excluded?
go ahead and let users make multiple accounts. the current, invalid, answer here is biometric provisioning (done not to protect anything but government and corporate interests). personally I don't care if an adult wants to fry their brain, provided that they have been adequately educated as to the extent of what they are doing to themselves. it's why I included the parental proviso, because protection from brain frying is most important during childhood.
LLMs and social media is 500+ PHD behavioral psychologists working together to make you do things at any price so they can make as much money as they can - in fact, if they don't try to make as much money as they can, everyone involved will be fired.
To me this is one of the final forms of our current laissez-faire capitalism - we are literally taking away our own agency in the name of "freedom" (of capitalists to maximize returns).
dlPFC deactivation is observed in a lot of immersive tasks. There are a lot of tasks that do this. Playing video games, as one example https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/4-431-26797-2_11
Interpreting fMRI results like this article does is almost always wrong. Different activities produce different patterns of brain activity. You could put someone in an fMRI machine, have them do virtually any activity, and then write a headline saying that doing that activity turns of key brain regions that are important for something. The trick is that all brain regions are important for something. Having them be less active during a task doesn't imply that it's good or bad. It just shows you which parts of the brain are involved in that task.
This blogspam article isn't great. The study at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192... has more details, like the fact that those brain regions come online while viewing other less-preferred videos. The results aren't really indicative of anything by themself. It would have been more interesting if they compared to something, like watching a long involved movie or playing video games, but they didn't.
Also this post is coming from a fresh account that only spams links to this blog. Maybe the mods will want to switch the link to the actual study instead: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
I haven’t read the study, but I’ve read the comments so far.
I wonder if this mechanism is the same mechanism that impacts, say, swipe-focused dating websites, as well? And Twitter feeds with super-short messages. A lot of the most viral modern tech has been bite-sized content feeds of various types.
They are all reward hacking, but tiktok is audiovisual immersion, dating apps are romantic validation and twitter is outrage/information foraging
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16101310 (2018)
> "Matt Mayberry, who works at a California startup called Dopamine Labs, says it's common knowledge in the industry that Instagram exploits this craving by strategically withholding "likes" from certain users. If the photo-sharing app decides you need to use the service more often, it'll show only a fraction of the likes you've received on a given post at first, hoping you'll be disappointed with your haul and check back again in a minute or two."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28763413 also speaks to this.
(Dopamine Labs is now boundless.ai, only one example, the reward hacking mentioned is everywhere in socials, adult content, sports betting, for reward maxxing)
That's a weird old myth. I don't know why you dug up an old quote from a startup founder pumping his startup from 2018 in The Globe and Mail.
There were investigations into it after that the conclusions was that nobody believed it or could replicate it: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/does-instagram-withh...
Either the person was making something up, or he just didn't understand how hyperscale apps work toward eventual consistency rather than having everything propagated the instant you press the button.
It’d be fairly easy to set up an experiment to validate if that were the case.
I think that should be illegal. I don’t know how to legislate it in a way that makes sense and actually accomplishes the goal (or if that’s even possible), but I would support someone trying to figure it out.
Full social media ban, problem solved. There’s no point wasting more time discussing these things when they’re very obviously a large net negative on society.
Call your state and federal representatives, it's the only way. Run for office if you have the appetite for it.
It's about the same amount of time that attention is given to any focus, most of those are less than a SFV length.
It really makes sense now. Emotional dysregulation comes into play and now I wonder that it's not just me who is quietly angry (at Match Group) all the time while still addicted to swipe based dating apps.
Leetcode became popular along the same time line.
Coincides with GenZ aging into adulthood after being educated in the debunked "3-cueing" or "whole language" reading education model. So far 40 states have pivoted away from it as states that switched first saw reading comprehension improve.
Whole lot of social experimentation without informed consent being put on people by 50+ year olds who run the world and never had to jump through the same thought policing.
Psychiatrist argues Americans have lost their grit for irrational reality we are forced to live in and actually are snowflakes: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
Eeeh, Leetcode is older. I’m a millenial and it was popular when I was going through - 10ish years earlier.
It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.
What if I watch a movie in 56 two minute clips while someone extrudes playdoh in the corner?
Reading might not make you intellectual, but if you read because you thought it made you intellectual, it definitely made you insufferable.
Isn't much of all this the modern couch potato and same as many research done being glued to the TV? It's channel surfing.
It's a lot worse. It's like comparing a bow and arrow to an M-16. Yes they both shoot projectiles, but...
The quantity is endless. You can run out of channels, sweep through them a few times, give up, and get bored, while doom scrollers give you an infinite stream of faux-novelty. It's entirely possible to scroll for eternity and never run out of what at least seems, to your limbic system, like information and social stimulation.
The content is generally much lower quality than TV. Even really bad dumb TV is high art compared to a lot of what's on the doom scrollers. It's hyper-optimized for narrow addictiveness and literally nothing else.
There's a closed feedback loop optimization system in place. The site knows you're scrolling. It knows how fast, where you pause, in some cases even where your eyeballs are going. It knows what makes you interact. It knows what you watched before you stopped watching vs what you watched and kept watching. It also has tons of third party data on you and sensor data that often even includes your location. It can optimize its addiction mechanism in a personalized rapid feedback closed loop way that television could never achieve.
It's like a smart drug that tries to keep you hooked. Imagine if the heroin had a learning algorithm that adapted its chemical structure in real time to keep you from quitting and it was powered by fleet-wide learning cross all heroin molecules in the world.
I get the TikTok addiction, but before that it was fb, before that was the tv, before that the newspaper/magazines, before that the books, before that table games etc
I don’t know it seems that regardless of the technology the brain needs dozing off from reality.
The hyper normalization on technology fueled escapism is the difference.
Everyone had freedom to pick their poison so to speak. Now? All tech and screen based.
Hyper-social normalization always falls apart. It's unnatural; modern human biology evolved for thousands solving problems mostly in isolation. Tech fueled distribution of material goods humans need to survive is great as it removed risk to biology. But social normalization sucks.
Whether the socialized motive is appease gods by living up to scripture, keep a job/build career make money, or validate it just normalizes people and if we all know the same shit, why discuss anything with them? We already know the same shit.
You read the newspapers, books, watch a movie: eventually there is an end and you have to do something else
Also, books, TV, board games, newspapers didn’t disappear. So it’s compounded in some ways
I think there is something distinctly unique between dozing off from reality by letting your mind wander or twiddling your thumbs, and scrolling short form video.
This is just a nonsensically reductive argument.
Reading is obviously healthier than scrolling tiktok.
> the brain needs dozing off from reality
Sure, and the body needs to be fed, but it still matters what and how much you feed it.
In my personal experience short form content is easier to get sucked into for hours on end than those other ones and something I’m more likely to regret participating in. (Learning this early I stopped so I’m not the biggest consumer of it and may have an atypical opinion compared to 1-2 billion people actively watching tik tok for hours a day.)
Hmm... this doesn't quite add up. Do we have brain scans showing that critical thinking centers of the brain turn off when people read books or play table games?
Exactly, should the "control regions" being deactivated be something that is activated all the time, or is that associated with burnout, or chronic stress?
"It's not that bad, everything was toxic befor so we can continue as if nothing was bad."
They are different categories. Brain rot isn’t an imagined thing and we aren’t confused about where it comes from
Something feels different with the short form, rapid fire stuff, at least to me
The Reddit tier mental gymnastics on display here to avoid any kind of acknowledgement of the dangers of short form video specifically is impressive.
Yesterday someone showed a TikTok video where a friend of him was interviewed on the street. The question was, “What is your best fighting stance?”
I found it surprising how little depth the video had
Blipverts you say.
I never made that connection, and I am old enough to have seen Max Headroom when it came out. Thank you.
I would like to repeat one of my core beliefs: we are all easily programmed meat machines. Accepting this fact is uncomfortable, but important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
Now that is what I call a series ahead of its time! Also saw it as it came out, had totally forgotten about that word.
I was young, and it was like a fever dream. I couldn't believe that was on TV. It was pretty darn subversive.
Today I found out that half my traffic on my apps are coming from bots. I am considering leaving the online world. Its becoming a hostile unpleasant place. This article report only fuels my devotion.
hell yeah it does, feels nice at the end of a long day
Worthwhile to note that “TikTok” here just means the format, not the platform. YouTube has its “shorts”, Facebook, insta, X, et all engage heavily in milking your doom scrolled eyeballs for time and profit.
I uninstalled basically all of these EXCEPT youtube, and that's what I struggle with sometimes now. I find so much great long- and medium-form content on Youtube that I want to keep it around. But I have to admit that I can sometimes fall down a time-wasting rabbit hole with shorts.
The Youtube app now has a "shorts feed limit" under "time management" that will limit your access to the auto-scroll shorts feed to a certain amount per day. Worth checking out!
Youtube is the only platform that has the potential to be actually positive for your life, which makes it hard to get rid of.
By putting AI into every product I think Google has made a tactical error on YouTube, since the “summarize it this video” feature is helping me spend far less time watching rage bait political content.
It is a proprietary eponym.
The brain is incredibly energy hungry so it evolved to detect situations that don’t require full attention and activates the Default Mode Network. This happens when you’re zoning out to pretty much anything, and indicates that you’re essentially in “low power mode”.
My question here is whether the framing of the content in question “shutting off brain regions” is an honest one compared to what I said above. fMRI is amazing to be sure, but what it tells us is limited.
So without endorsing crap content on any way, I’m very skeptical of this article’s conclusions based on the study in question.
I would postulate that it's even worse than this, given that default mode network activity is proven to be essential for a healthy mind. This is when engage in useful thinking even when we're not "doing anything".
I think screen activity/tiktok keeps us in some kind of purgatory where we can neither fully engage nor fully disengage.
This "low power mode" is a myth, the brain pulls a pretty constant amount of power (about 20% of metabolic energy), and most power isn't consumed by the action potential/neurons firing, but rather in keeping the neuron ready to fire.
And the regions involved in the default mode network are actually some of the metabolically most active regions in the brain, involved in memory consolidation, future simulation, theory of mind, and self-narrative; among other things.
This framing seems like the correct one, but I think that just like being physically sedentary leads to weakness of muscles and joints and health problems, so being mentally sedentary could also lead to a mind that is weakened in the long term, though the weakness could likely be reversed with exposure to exercise.
Now this I can agree with unreservedly.
the article does note:
"The researchers caution against reading the deactivation as evidence of impaired cognitive function. As they put it in the paper, “this deactivation should not be interpreted as a failure of cognitive control capacity.” Instead, the team argues the pattern likely reflects an adaptive shift toward low-effort, automatic processing during passive, low-conflict viewing."
my take: if the study authors could qualify a subject's liked videos, they could qualify a subject's liked activities, and study activation thresholds prior to and post short form content exposure. this would provide a better substrate from which to draw such conclusions.
but I don't need a study to tell me that short form content fries the brain ... it fries my brain!
That’s a bad thing right?
Less brain, no thinking. Me thinks
the linked study effectively drills down on aspects of previous work ...
"High-frequency SFV [short form video] use was consistently associated with attentional disruption, reduced executive functioning, and emotional dysregulation."
"Neuroimaging results revealed reduced activation in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) and Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) regions ... when participants viewed personalised TikTok videos."
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.27.25334540v...
"(The ACC) is involved in ... higher-level functions, such as attention allocation, reward anticipation, decision-making, impulse control .. and emotion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterior_cingulate_cortex
"The DLPFC is ... the highest cortical area that is involved in motor planning, organization and regulation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorsolateral_prefrontal_cortex
by permitting unlimited short form content and not disallowing child access we are allowing corporations to destroy kids brains. therefore I posit the latest generation has been rendered retarded, which will pose a dire threat to continued stability unless addressed.
It's this generations leaded gasoline and paint
Absolutely baffling you’re being downvoted lmao. Social media Astro turfing teams working overtime I guess
see below comment by taurath for another great example of the truth being downvoted
very worrying study, essentially its a digital->neurochemistry chasm crossing substance that uses the 2 senses.
all more reasons to heavily discourage the usage of short form content , we might require regulations against what is essentially an invisible drug that rapidly replicate and distribute itself among the masses.
Full social media ban would be easier and more effective imo. Public spaces would come back to life in no time at all if social media was heavily curtailed or banned entirely. This would be an obvious win for everyone involved outside of the terminally online and corporations benefiting from their lack of self control.
define short form content as anything under an arbitrary time threshold, legislate all online providers of short form content to mandate an arbitrary time limit per day for all users, add a law that parents knowingly allowing children to exceed national daily short form content limits are subject to penalty. seems fairly straightforward. but uh, I guess we could all capitulate to giving corporations our biometric data ...
I don't think it's straightforward at all. What's considered "short form content".
Just video?
Does just audio count?
Does a gif count?
What if I make a website that uploads videos at 1/10th the speed, and the user plays it back 10x faster so it becomes short form?
What if i make a video aggregator website that pulls from multiple different sources so the user gets around the time limit per day per user?
What if users just make multiple accounts?
I don't think we are legally equipped to deal with this at all.
It's fairly obvious what "short form content" is in context of discussions around TikTok, Reels, Shorts etc.
How about anything that tracks the user's behavior and changes its output based on that behavior specific to that user. If I have a table somewhere in my software that identifies a user and references behavior, not intentional settings, just behavior and that is used to determine what the software does. Make that illegal and a lot of problems go away. To me it is this feedback loop that is insidious.
Let me add, it sound very much like 3D-prohibition for guns. The total demonization of anything, because it could be bad, given certain conditions, is a recipe for disaster. As you say, is extremely difficult to define where are the limits, and the extremely hard to apply the limits without screwing over millions.
study each proposed form of short form content regarding impact on cognitive function and select the most destructive forms for legislation.
if you make a website that provides short form content you are subject. why would an aggregator be excluded?
go ahead and let users make multiple accounts. the current, invalid, answer here is biometric provisioning (done not to protect anything but government and corporate interests). personally I don't care if an adult wants to fry their brain, provided that they have been adequately educated as to the extent of what they are doing to themselves. it's why I included the parental proviso, because protection from brain frying is most important during childhood.
LLMs and social media is 500+ PHD behavioral psychologists working together to make you do things at any price so they can make as much money as they can - in fact, if they don't try to make as much money as they can, everyone involved will be fired.
To me this is one of the final forms of our current laissez-faire capitalism - we are literally taking away our own agency in the name of "freedom" (of capitalists to maximize returns).
Shocking that Zhejiang University didn't find this when TikTok was Chinese...