Science studies reveal the way we understand attention is changing with time, as a result of our new relationship with electronics and, especially, the internet. The point is: is the evolution of technology becoming damaging?
For starters, how can we comprehend what “brain rot” means? It is an informal way, used mostly by young adults and teenagers, to describe a sensation in which your mind feels dull, apathetic, unable to focus or without creativity after long periods consuming superficial and repetitive content like short videos and memes — the “infinite scroll”.
An important thing to understand is whether the problem is the early introduction to the internet or the excessive use of it. The inevitable exhaustive routine most people have to deal with leads them to introducing their babies to screens from a very early stage of their lives, which causes the kids to be used to extreme kinds of stimulation.
Nowadays, every aspect of life is affected by the use of electronics, and the new stage of social media has a lot to do with that. TikTok reinvented the way we watch videos, and we are getting used to watching shorter and more simplified contents. The urge to consume as much content as we can, as fast as we can, makes us need more and more stimulation.
Other social media platforms are also introducing videos in the same format, and chat apps now have the option to listen to audio messages faster. Faster stimulations end up not being enough after some time, so other ways of fulfilling the need for more are becoming indispensable – like watching two or more videos at once to be able to pay attention to one audio only, normally satisfying or gaming videos.
The biggest impacts are seen at schools. Kids and teenagers are not able to pay attention to classes, especially after the first minutes of it, even if the subject is something they are interested in. It becomes hard to focus on tests, almost impossible to spend that time without using the phone.
To study at home, websites are being developed to “simplify” school subjects and transform them into TikTok-style videos, and even when not using these technologies, people need to have the TV on, or music, or to be playing games whiledoing other things. Most people can’t stay focused in silence anymore.
What science says
Psychologist Márcia Verstandig Pereira Lima Escobosa explains that attention is a “range of processes that allow the person to select, focus and maintain focus to relevant stimulations, whilst suppressing internal and/or external distractions.”
There are four types of attention — selective attention, the capacity to focus on a single specific stimulation, ignoring the surroundings; Sustained attention, maintaining focus for a prolonged time in a task; Altered attention, that changes the focus from one task to another efficiently; and divided attention, doing two things at once, which is harder and less effective.
Márcia also highlights the importance to acknowledge that attention is intimately connected to other cognitive functions, such as memory, language and executive functions. “When someone is feeling anxious, for example, their attention turns to internal or external threats, and that makes concentrating harder. In depressive states, the cognitive slowdown can reduce the capacity to keep focused, even through simple activities.”
Although it is scientifically proven that everyone is affected by extreme stimulation, there are clear differences in how adults, teenagers and children receive those impacts, not to mention the distinction between neurotypical and neuroatypical people. The different stages of emotional, cognitive and brain development cause the impacts to vary in intensity and type of outcome.
Children, for starters, have their brains going through an accelerated development, while the teenage brain is in the emotional and identity vulnerability stage. In adults, on the other hand, there’s the multitasking, the overwhelming and the attentional fatigue.
Each one of those have consequences that can last for the rest of their lives, but it is harder for those who were exposed to technology from a very early age to understand the benefits of idleness. Some of them can’t even imagine how to live life without those simulations.
There is also a distinct way to view neurodivergent people and their relation with stimulations, Márcia claims. “Psychological disorders can affect attention and focus for various reasons, for their own characteristics and symptoms, or even for the use of medications that can compromise the attentional process.”
Of course, it is hard to define the exact difficulties each disorder can cause, but the main point to be observed and discussed is: different people require different stimulations in order to function. Not the extreme ones, but rather of the ones important to create a healthy and good individual atmosphere. Some people have a more accelerated mind and more exaggerated thoughts, that get in the way of paying attention to one specific thing.
As mentioned before, idleness is a very important factor in life, andit must not be mistaken for laziness or unproductive boredom. It has a restoring role in attention health, creativity and mental health in general. The therapist argues that idleness allows a process of cognitive “decompression”, while we live in a state of almost constant mental overwhelm.
“This state activates the brain’s executive attention mode, demanding continuous control, planning and vigilance. Conscious or creative idleness (the free time with no immediate productive purpose) allows the brain to activate the ‘Default Mode Network’, responsible for the internal processing and self-reflexion, memory consolidation, imagination and creativity, and the emotional and cognitive recuperation.”
In other words, idleness helps our minds reorganize and makes it easy to regain our attention spans and focus. Márcia recommends some methods to train our brains daily and, with effort, recover the old relations people had with attention.
- Mindfulness: training the brain to be in the present without judgment, reducing the emotional reactivity and improving sustained attention. Practice focusing on breathing for 5 minutes a day;
- Pomodoro technique: dividing the time in blocks (25 minutes of focus + 5 minutes of pause);
- Environment with no concurring stimulations: silence notifications, use headphones with white noise, close unnecessary open windows;
- Sleep quality: sleep regulates the superior cognitive functions, including attention, memory and decision-making. Sleep deprivation drastically reduces the sustained attention and the capacity to use the selective attention;
- Regular physical exercises: it improves the brain blood flow and stimulates neuroplasticity. Aerobic activities like walks, dance, swimming or riding bicycles are great;
- Balanced nutrition: diets with omega-3, proteins, iron and B complex vitamins help maintain attention. Avoiding the excess of sugar and caffeine that cause energy oscillation is also important;
- Cognitive and Behavioral strategies: planning and prioritizing the executive functions. Making lists, establishing clear goals and dividing chores in small parts avoids mental overwhelm.
Mental health and a generational conflict
Going further, there are other psychological factors that contribute to the phenomenon called “brain rot”. Many times, the excessive use of fast digital content is an unconscious way to avoid difficultemotions like anxiety, sadness, solitude or even boredom.
We scroll infinitely in order not to think, feel or access our own discomfort, leading to emotional escapism – continuous stimulations suppress our emotions and allow us to avoid the present and our internal sensations and problems.
When exposed to thousands of micro-decisions every day, like choosing what to watch, click, like or respond, our brains go into ‘low power mode’, enhancing the automatic, superficial and passive response, and it gets hard to engage in tasks that require more intellectual effort, such as reading, writing, deep concentrating or critical thinking.
That results in a mind that seems lazy – or “rotten”, but it is just exhausted, drained and overwhelmed. Social media and content platforms reinforce a psychological and neurological pattern of immediate rewards. That lowers our capacity to delay gratification, which is fundamental to functions like planning, persistence and deep learning.
A lot of people that experience “brain rot” report that it comes along with a feeling of emptiness, apathy and a generalized lack of motivation. That can be related to not having a clear purpose in life, to the lack of significant activities and the excess of passivity in routine. In other words, consuming without creating, seeing without interacting, scrolling without connecting.
Márcia adds: “The “brain rot” might also be related, or even mask underlying clinical charts”. When the subject moves to family relationships, talking about how older generations are used to thinking the newer ones simply “lack discipline”, she points out the controversy behind that discourse
“This criticism has been repeated throughout generations, and today it comes with an even bigger emotional charge, precisely because we are living a radical transformation in the way we think, learn, work and exist. I understand where the criticism comes from, but I believe it does not make justice to the complexity of the world young people are being brought up in”, she says.
“It is common that older generations, that lived in very different contexts, interpret the current behaviors with their own values and references from their time. To them, discipline was synonymous with strictness, hierarchy, obedience and sacrifice. Times were slower, predictable and linear. Life was established by fixed routines, clear obligations and an ideal of success that involved stability and repetition”, Márcia continues.
“Teenagers nowadays live in an unstable, hyperconnected environment, full of stimulations, but also uncertainties. They not only have to deal with chores, but notifications, social media, global crisis, climate change, pressure to perform, constant comparison and an excess of information hard to process. They are not “less disciplined”, they have requirements other generations didn’t have. […] Maybe what’s up for discussion is not lack of discipline, but the necessity to ressignify what is discipline in the contemporary world”, the therapist proposes.
The attention span we are losing is more related to the way we see attention and our relation with it in the current days. Technology has a big role in every big advance we make, but it also places new and bigger challenges in our development and growth as human beings. It affects the way we think, feel and connect to each other.
“Brain rot” just describes a generation that is emotionally exhausted and is not able to relax and use their brains to learn and focus the way they should. More and more, we see babies that learn to scroll in apps before learning how to tie their shoes, teenagers that know every Instagram filter but have no idea how to study with pen and paper and adults that are unable to turn their phones off during work meetings.
The “brain rot” phenomenon is an extremely important matter, so much that the expression was nominated Word Of The Year in 2024 by the Oxford University.
Losing the attention span is an actual big problem, but talking about it and making more people conscious about the negative effects that we are involuntarily dealing with can make us start treating it seriously and make more people learn about strategies to improve their lives.
The article above was edited by Isadora Mangueira.
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