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GIVE credit to the Oxford English Dictionary for moving with the times; last year the OED added ‘brain rot’ to the over 600,000 English words, phrases and definitions already in its lexicon, defining it as “the perceived decline in intelligence or critical thinking, especially from consuming excessive, trivial online content, or the content itself that causes this effect”.
You’ve almost certainly felt it, even if you may not have known how to define it; I know I have. It’s the feeling you get after you’ve watched dozens upon dozens of short-form videos — whether on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or any other platform — scroll by on your device as you sit there consuming a steady diet of infinitely inane, utterly unchallenging and mostly mindless ‘content’ (now with 80 per cent more AI slop) being beamed directly into your increasingly mush-like brain. You’ve spent hours but you’ve learned nothing. You’re unfocused and uninvolved but you can’t stop because, hey, let’s see what the next reel brings. Do this long enough or often enough and you’ll find that your attention span is now roughly what one can expect from a two-year old who is also hopped up on sugary snacks.
Now, the thing is that if someone like me starts complaining about this I’m usually told it’s because I’m a boomer and a relic of a bygone age who just can’t grasp why the telegraph needs to be invented when we have perfectly good messenger pigeons. And, yes, that’s true. To an extent. Every time there’s a new technological or cultural phenomenon (this is both) you’ll find doomsayers like myself running it down and creating moral panic. But for those of you who are inclined to agree with me, the good news is that we have actual research on our side.
The American Psychological Association recently published a review of 71 studies on the effects of heavy consumption of short form content on nearly 100,000 participants and found that the majority of them showed a marked decline in cognition, impulse control and attention spans. Even more troubling is that heavy consumption of such videos also “increased symptoms of depressions, anxiety and loneliness”. That’s not all; a more focused study spanning six years of research was published in October and also makes it clear that heavy consumption of this mental junk food lowers your ability to concentrate on a single task for any significant period of time and is (unsurprisingly) linked to poor academic performance. After all, you are what you eat.
The dumbing down of humanity, unfortunately, is only just beginning. Unless you’ve been blissfully off the grid for the last few years, you’ll have seen how pervasive the use of AI chatbots and tools has become. Now, there’s no harm in that — AI can and is being used in some truly remarkable ways, but increasingly we see that far too many people are outsourcing basic cognitive functions to chatbots, with predictable, and now quantifiable, results.
Over the course of four months the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tasked 54 adults to write a series of three essays each. Divided into three groups, they were asked to write an essay using (1) only ChatGPT, (2) only a search engine and (3) using only their own brains and no external help. All the while their brain activity was being monitored and the essays were put through a linguistic analysis.
The results are, at least to me, as terrifying as they are unsurprising. Compared to the ‘brain only’ group the ‘ChatGPT only’ group members’ brain connectivity dropped sharply: from 79 points to 42pc, amounting to a 47pc drop in neural engagement. As a result, 83.3pc of the ChatGPT group members couldn’t recall a single sentence they had ‘written’ just minutes ago and felt little or no ownership over what they had produced. And what they produced was the same generic writing that two English teachers who assessed the essays called ‘soulless’. It also caused extreme laziness: by the third essay many of the participants weren’t just using ChatGPT for ‘research’ but actually had it write and edit the entire essay for them.
Basic cognitive functions are being outsourced to chatbots.
Then came a twist: a fourth essay in which the groups were switched around and the ‘ChatGPT only’ group was forced to rely solely on their brains while the ‘brain only’ group was allowed the use of ChatGPT. The AI-to-brain group performed abysmally, as if a cognitive debt had built up and they had forgotten how to think for themselves. We can’t turn back the clock, but we need to understand that switching on a chatbot while turning your brain off will have disastrous consequences. On the flip side, in the not-so-distant future the ability to hold one’s focus for longer than an hour, or to be able to construct a coherent sentence without critical aid, will probably place you in the top 10 percentile of humanity.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, December 15th, 2025
