YoIf you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and write the words “skibidi bath” on YouTube. The 11-second video shows an animated human head protruding from the toilet bowl while singing the nonsensical lyrics “skibidi dop dop dop yeah yeah.” The clip has been viewed more than 215 million times and generated hundreds of millions of references on TikTok and other social networks.
It’s fitting, then, that the Oxford English Dictionary has just announced “brain rot” as its word of the year. As an abstract concept, brain rot is something we are all vaguely aware of. The dictionary defines it as “the alleged deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially seen as a result of excessive consumption of material (now particularly online content) considered trivial or unchallenging.” But few people are aware of how technology is literally rotting our brains and how decisively compulsive Internet use is destroying our gray matter.
Brain rot was foreshadowed nearly 20 years ago when scientists studied the effects of a new invention called “email,” specifically the impact that a relentless barrage of information would have on participants’ brains. The results? Constant cognitive overload had a more negative effect than cannabis use: participants’ IQ dropped by an average of 10 points.
and this was previous to smartphones putting the internet at our fingertips, which has resulted in the average UK adult now spending at least four hours a day online (Gen Z men spend five and a half hours a day online and Gen Z women six and a half.)
In recent years, a wealth of academic research from institutions such as Harvard Medical School, Oxford University, and King’s College London evidence found what internet is reducing our gray matter, shorten attention spanweakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The brain areas affected included “attention abilities, as the ever-evolving flow of online information encourages our attention divided between multiple media sources,” “memory processes,” and “social cognition.”
Article after article explains how vulnerable we are to Internet-induced brain rot. “High levels of Internet use and multimedia multitasking are associated with decreased gray matter in prefrontal regions.” find one. Exposure of people with Internet addiction “structural changes of the brain” and “reduced gray matter”. Some academics have even referred to excess technology during the years of brain development as a risk.”digital dementia”.
In 2018, a decade of data analyzed by leading memory psychologists at Stanford University found that people who frequently interacted with multiple online platforms had 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 now live in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation.” Dr. Gloria Mark, professor of computer science at the University of California and author of attention spanhas found evidence of how drastically our ability to concentrate is declining. In 2004, his team of researchers found that the average attention span on any screen was two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was reduced to 47 seconds. This “is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society,” he said. said a podcast in 2023.
But we are not entirely to blame if technology makes us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to completely captivate us. Silicon Valley’s dirtiest design feature, which is everywhere once you spot it, is infinite scroll, compared toward “bottomless soup bowl”, in which participants will continue to mindlessly eat from a bowl of soup if it continues to fill up. A constantly “reloading” online source manipulates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven endless “seeking” loops can become addictive.
What will happen if we do not control the deterioration of our cognitive health? Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris told the US Congress. in 2019 that billions of people – “a psychological footprint the size of Christianity” – now receive their information from platforms whose business model “ties their profits to the amount of attention they capture, creating a ‘race to the bottom’ encephalic’ to get attention by hacking our lizard brain (dopamine, fear, indignation) to win.”
His warnings are as harsh as they come. “Persuasive technology is a powerful and tremendously underrated force that is shaping the world,” he said. “It has taken control of the pen of human history and will lead us to catastrophe if we do not remove it.”
The term brain rot was popularized online by young people who are most at risk of its effects. The fact that those most at risk are the most aware of the problem is encouraging news. The first step towards any change is understanding the problem. And there are reasons to be hopeful. In recent years, anti-technology movements have gained momentum, from teenagers turning to dumb phones to campaigns for a childhood without smartphones; green shoots for a future in which we are able to recover our minds. So perhaps Skibidi Toilet has a more poignant meaning after all: an awareness of where human intelligence currently stands. Now you can go in one of two directions: up or around the U-curve.