I was recently sitting with Guillermo, my friend's 9-year-old son, while watching a YouTube video on television.
I wanted to know a child's perspective on 'brain rot', Oxford University Press' 2024 word of the year which describes both low-quality video content and what apparently happens to the mind after watching too much. Naturally, I looked for someone with field experience. The playground, to be more specific.
Guillermo spoke softly into the remote control: “Skibidi rizz”, a kind of modern “open sesame” that summoned a veritable buffet of short and strange videos.
A disembodied head spewed meaningless words from a toilet (Why is he in the toilet? Does he live there?). The teens washed down on nacho cheese and an energy drink while lip-syncing to audio from popular YouTubers. talking about his Lunchable knockoff. A chicken nugget with a man's face; I couldn't tell you what I was doing or why.
This flavor of short-form Internet content (absurd, easily produced, plotless) appears to be having an effect on its viewers that is being felt by schools and youth mental health experts.
Educators have talked for years about students' shrinking attention spans and how children struggle to follow the most basic instructions.
Guillermo emphasizes to me that he is not a fan of brain rot videos. On the one hand, he doesn't want to be like the kids at school who like brain rot.
they are iPad kidssays Guillermo mockingly, one of those who scream in despair when they are separated from their tablets. A boy in his class is prone to shouting, without being asked, “Skibidi bathroom!” — behavior reminiscent of “random” humor It was from the 2000s.
@fromweb All episodes of Skibidi Toilet Part 1 #skibidi #skibiridopdop ♬ I am original – from the web
“Is this supposed to be fun?” asked.
Guillermo responds with a shrug.
“I don't want to see the brain rot, even if it's animated,” he says firmly.
That's an important detail because Guillermo is an aspiring video animator. Brain rot, says Guillermo, is rare and has no history. Its creators, he tells me, want to attract attention and rack up views quickly to get free material. (It's common for popular social media creators to get brand offers with companies that use influencer marketing).
Brain rot's biggest crime, at least for him as an artist, is that he lacks creativity.
The Newport Institute wrote about the Phenomenon and negative results. of brain rot, categorized by scrolling through social media for long periods of time.
“Scrolling through social media platforms increases the neurochemical dopamine, which produces feelings of satisfaction and pleasure,” according to the Youth Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment Center. “The more you do it, the more you want to do it. Your brain associates scrolling with a feeling of gratification, even when you are aware of its negative consequences. In this way, displacement can become a behavioral addiction.”
Educators are testing ways to manage some of the problems this type of social media content is associated with: students having trouble paying attention, absorbing information and feeling connected at school.
Programmed to like 'Likes'
One of the reasons young people have a hard time disconnecting from social media is that their brains are driven by dopamine, says researcher Laura Marciano. Marciano is a research associate at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and was the lead author of the chapter on digital media and brain development in adolescence for the upcoming edition. “Manual of children and screens”.
As Marciano explains, the brain's reward-driven limbic system is very active during adolescence, while the prefrontal cortex that controls behavior and impulses does not fully develop in the brain until around age 25.
“Through this system, we can anticipate a reward at a biological level,” he says. “Our brain already releases dopamine before we receive (likes) on social media, especially at that age.”
That reward-seeking brain system makes teens vulnerable to what researchers call problematic digital media use, Marciano says, which is characterized by behaviors like constantly thinking about their phone, feeling negative emotions when they can't use their phones, and withdrawal symptoms. According to the book, approximately one in four adolescents reports symptoms of problematic digital media use.
“Normally we tend to prioritize with our attention what is more rewarding than what requires a greater cognitive load; that comes naturally to us,” says Marciano. “If we think about students who study, obviously their brain will prioritize browsing social media because it is more rewarding and requires less effort than studying.”
Students don't have to passively watch brain rot videos on social media to distract themselves from their schoolwork. Marciano says researchers have found that even having a phone out of sight in a backpack decreases students' attention. During a study in which participants were asked to complete a puzzle, Marciano says that only those who left their phones in a different room were able to focus on the task at hand.
The fast-paced content ecosystem on social media can also impact how students learn and retain information. The brain first needs to pay exclusive, sustained attention to something before committing to long-term memory, Marciano explains, along with sleep to reinforce it.
“If we think about studying a lot and then using the smartphone or watching a stream of TikTok videos, that can be very disruptive to the memory trail going from short-term memory to long-term memory,” he says.
Parents can help their children learn to manage social media use by setting time limits at home, Marciano says, but it will only be effective if parents model those changes and apply the rule to all family members. In her own research, she found that the amount of time parents spend on social media is also directly related to the amount of time their children spend browsing.
“We know that there are also some benefits if social media is used for a limited period of time because it allows us to stay connected with other people, learn new content, get inspired and find a community,” says Marciano. “It is important to create a balanced view of the good use of social networks.”
Analog solutions for digital problems
Shari Camhi, superintendent of the Baldwin Union Free School District in New York, says cell phones have never been seen as anything more than a distraction in the district of about 4,500 students. They are not permitted in any K-12 classroom. They are not allowed at all on elementary and secondary school campuses. High school students can use their phones during lunch, but the devices remain in their lockers.
“That does not mean that it is not without difficulties. It’s a constant reminder to put away their cell phones,” says Camhi. “We put up this big barrier that says 'No.'”
The effects of excessive social media consumption were noticeable despite the district's efforts to put up a firewall and keep students focused on their classwork. Especially after the students returned from the COVID-19 lockdown, they had lost some of their social skills and got angry faster.
“When you go online, what you're reading is probably a sentence, two or three, or maybe a paragraph,” Camhi says. “So there's this TikTok, right? They are like 15 second videos. It's all in these short, quick bursts. And the work we do in school is not short or quick.”
Camhi doesn't like the term “brain rot.” She believes the phrase lacks the empathy students need to strengthen the skills that social media has diminished.
“That doesn't mean we're not tough on this. Anyone here will tell you I'm tough. “I’m a kid who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn before Brooklyn was too expensive to live in,” says Camhi. “I'm not a pushover by any means, but I just wouldn't use that term because whatever our kids are going through, they need more support. They need more guidance, they need guardrails, they need direction. “They don’t need negativity.”
Camhi wanted to get students (and their parents) away from their phones. Last year, the district hosted a family picnic where kids and adults played the games Camhi played growing up in Brooklyn, when the only way to get your friends together on the playground was to talk to them in person. The Baldwin Street Games included jumping rope, hit the penny and scully shuffle.
“In the middle of that it started to rain. Nobody left,” says Camhi. “The response was incredibly positive because it was genuine, pure and unfettered. The kids' reaction was, 'Can we do this every day?' So sometimes going back in time isn't so bad.”
It's unrealistic to expect parents to separate their children from their phones forever, Camhi says. To do so would be to deprive students of half their social lives. But the superintendent advises parents to limit the time children spend on electronic devices at home.
The Baldwin School District is also teaching students not to take everything they see on social media at face value. Media literacy classes begin in sixth grade and continue through high school. Camhi says the goal is to ensure students learn to decipher what is real online and what is not.
“We found that success really lies in our students asking questions,” Camhi says. “Where is this coming from? Who is the author? Can I verify this? Those questions that children ask, and their ability to think about those questions, their ability to think about whether something seems feasible or probable, all of that is critical thinking.”
In March 2024, the district opened a wellness center at Baldwin Middle School to offer counseling and behavioral therapy to students in all grades. That includes what Camhi calls “academic well-being,” supporting students who have been avoiding school. Another center is being built at the district's high school.
“We're very, very focused on that because we believe that if you're not emotionally prepared, you're not going to learn,” he says, “so there's been a lot of effort to make sure our kids are healthy.”
As Camhi describes the district's work to support students, she often refers to her own childhood, a childhood characterized by connection. When it comes to the activities the district seeks in its classes, educators want students to be so engrossed that they don't even hear the bell ring, Camhi says.
When you see students plugging their ears with AirPods and staring at their phones, you don't see them connecting with the rest of the world: Camhi sees them filtering the world in front of them.
“Social networks are something always present, always responding, always publishing… It doesn't disappear. The ability to escape that is really almost non-existent, so I think, in large part, one of the reasons we're seeing this violation of social norms is because you can never escape that constant picking at the scab. .”
