7 ms·
Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- thin_carapace 2mo agothe 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/10.1101/2025.08.27.25334540v2.full 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 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 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.
- Zetaphor 2mo agoIt's this generations leaded gasoline and paint
- gunsle 2mo agoAbsolutely baffling you’re being downvoted lmao. Social media Astro turfing teams working overtime I guess
- thin_carapace 2mo agosee below comment by taurath for another great example of the truth being downvoted
- zuzululu 2mo agovery 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.
- thin_carapace 2mo agodefine 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 ...
- fl4regun 2mo agoI 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.
- f1shy 2mo agoLet 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.
- fuzzfactor 2mo agoDon't underestimate the desire some people have to screw over millions rather than merely thousands :(
- t-writescode 2mo agoI 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.
- DeluluDon 2mo agoIt'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.
- CGMthrowaway 2mo agoThey are all reward hacking, but tiktok is audiovisual immersion, dating apps are romantic validation and twitter is outrage/information foraging
- toomuchtodo 2mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16101310 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 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)
- doctoboggan 2mo agoI 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.
- MBCook 2mo agoBlipverts you say.
- consumer451 2mo agoI never made that connection, and I am old enough to have seen Max Headroom when it came out. Thank you. I would like to take this opportunity to state 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
- f1shy 2mo agoNow that is what I call a series ahead of its time! Also saw it as it came out, had totally forgotten about that word.
- consumer451 2mo agoI was young, and it was like a fever dream. I couldn't believe that was on TV. It was pretty darn subversive.
- MBCook 2mo agoLike other really good satire it keeps predicting things it wasn’t trying to. We’re living down to it.
- consumer451 2mo ago> We’re living down to it. Thank you for introducing me to this turn of phrase. I get the feeling that it will become more and more useful in the coming years.
- nunez 2mo agoHIGH LIFE
- 2mo ago
- EA-3167 2mo agoThe 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.
- im3w1l 2mo agoThis 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.
- EA-3167 2mo agoNow this I can agree with unreservedly.
- thin_carapace 2mo agothe 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!
- mapkkk 2mo agoI 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.
- woodpanel 2mo agoWorthwhile 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.
- sva_ 2mo agoIt is a proprietary eponym.
- zetazzed 2mo agoI 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!
- GPerson 2mo agoBy 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.
- Jtarii 2mo agoYoutube is the only platform that has the potential to be actually positive for your life, which makes it hard to get rid of.
- sidrag22 2mo agoI try to pressure people into just turning off the absolute majority of the social media / algo type recommendation stuff on youtube. I still "use" youtube, but my experience is night and day compared to the typical usage, I have my sidebar with a handful of creators i care about, tiny blue indicator next to their name if they have a new video i haven't seen, just like the normal UI. I think this portion is vital, it removes the "clickbait image" meta on youtube, I have to make the first move and say "I wonder what {user} posted". So i pretty much see, search bar and that text sidebar on my main screen for youtube. Its absurd seeing the standard youtube ui, after using it like this for a couple years now. This also just really really tightens who i follow. If i find myself clicking through to their profile and seeing what they posted and deciding not to watch, i consider that a waste of my time and after a handful of times i might just unfollow entirely.
- huijzer 2mo agoYesterday 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
- taurath 2mo agoLLMs 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).
- sghiassy 2mo agoThat’s a bad thing right? Less brain, no thinking. Me thinks
- whatever1 2mo agoI 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.
- gunsle 2mo agoThe Reddit tier mental gymnastics on display here to avoid any kind of acknowledgement of the dangers of short form video specifically is impressive.
- Jtarii 2mo agoThis is just a nonsensically reductive argument. Reading is obviously healthier than scrolling tiktok.
- whatever1 2mo agoLet’s take this argument to the extreme. Why reading mein kampf is healthier than looking at random funny videos? Both are addictive. The one is more dangerous than the other, demonstrably. Don’t get me started on religious books.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- chinathrow 2mo ago"It's not that bad, everything was toxic befor so we can continue as if nothing was bad."
- bognition 2mo agoHmm... 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?
- AquilineFeline 2mo agoSomething feels different with the short form, rapid fire stuff, at least to me
- thisisauserid 2mo agoShocking that Zhejiang University didn't find this when TikTok was Chinese...
- jzer0cool 2mo agoIsn't much of all this the modern couch potato and same as many research done being glued to the TV? It's channel surfing.
- api 2mo agoIt'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.
- avgDev 2mo agoIt 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.
- Waterluvian 2mo agoWhat if I watch a movie in 56 two minute clips while someone extrudes playdoh in the corner?
- schaefer 2mo agoPlus those shorts are out of order. So it’s gotta take more effort to piece the plot back together, right? :)
- sreekanth67 2mo agolol. someone make this app please.
- ryoshoe 2mo agoMaybe this could even work better for non-chronological movies like Memento
- Waterluvian 2mo agoExactly. It’s like making every movie Tenet. I have to actively watch and piece together the plot.
- cube00 2mo agoI watched a mother completely glued to her phone holding it 6 inches away from her face while her teen daughter was trying to talk to her. The mother would not look away from her phone while she sort of tried to answer her. Truely heartbreaking to watch.
- CuriouslyC 2mo agoReading might not make you intellectual, but if you read because you thought it made you intellectual, it definitely made you insufferable.
- holoduke 2mo agoToday 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.
- Aurornis 2mo agodlPFC 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 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/S1053811926000406 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/S1053811926000406 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
- tgv 2mo agoAnd that's leaving aside the question of what it would affect. Elasticity/learning? Would it result in forgetting, or losing skill? Apart from the problem that I (and others with me) have with the "area X does Y" school of neuro-cognition, measuring changes in activity does not measure changes in connections, synapses, or tissue. It is possible that inhibiting certain brain areas for a longer period will change e.g. cognitive skills. There is enough literature on losing skills after inactivity. But this approach can't bridge the gap. It makes more sense to observer TikTok users' behavior over time. That can give more information about the actual effects, although without nice, colorful blobs.
- flipnotyk 2mo agoOnly thing I took away from it was, "No wonder the algorithm is the golden goose"
- eqmvii 2mo agohell yeah it does, feels nice at the end of a long day
- unixhero 2mo agoI no longer get there. But when the algorithm gets really curated for me, 30 minutes on Tiktok is a fantastic good time. I have deleted my Tiktok account 5 times. No longer a user.
- bsenftner 2mo agoOh, and only these two social media sites? Or we're only going to headline echo that it is TikTok? Why does this smell like out of control propaganda?
- MBCook 2mo agoThey’re the most popular short content ones? Write this headline about Mastodon and no one would read it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- hbn 2mo agoHeadlines like this are tiring because they're always a vast simplification of an epidemic that has a much more complicated series of social and psychological causes than a simple "it turns ur brain off"
- tamimio 2mo agoI don’t have tiktok now, but years ago I downloaded it (i think before it was called musically), I used it for a day or two, and I remember after an hour or so of using it I get nauseous like how you might get on a boat, not severe enough to puke but still not comfy that you need to go for a walk or something to feel better. I deleted it and never used it again. And I don’t use any mainstream social media either since all bow have these shorts, if it’s not text based like rss or hn, it will be YouTube on videos at least 20min duration.
- gagan2020 2mo agoWhy only TikTok videos. Other contenders are Instagram reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, etc. BTW its Social Media as per studies https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12329480/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12329480/ Whole bunch of research, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/?term=Social+Media https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/?term=Social+Media But, my point is its normal Every generation behave differently. We shouldn't judge it even via these studies.
- rightbyte 2mo agoThe title of the linked article is "and Instagram reels". edit: Oh someone changed the title of the post now too.
- rendonroman 2mo ago[dead]
- jheriko 2mo ago[dead]
- workshy_ 2mo agoIt looks like this account (Akasci) was set up to promote rathbiotaclan.com which just looks like an AI generated newsite to me. Am I wrong?
- saaaaaam 2mo agoThe hilarious thing is that midway through reading this article a full screen (mobile) ad popped up which was some bullshit “influencer” style short form video ad.
- mvlipwig 2mo agoSmall-n fMRI studies tend to have issues with replication because of how noisy and difficult to use fMRI machines are. I would take this research more as an indication that more research is needed, as opposed to the be-all and end-all of how short-form video interacts with the brain. (Caveat: I have no expertise with neuroscience or using fMRI machines. I'm mostly basing my comment off pre-replication crisis fMRI experiments that failed to produce useful data upon scrutiny.)
- Noaidi 2mo agoI don’t know why no one talking about the importance of GABA and glutamate in the study. To me that’s the most fascinating and important part. They found that the children with higher GABA had a harder time switching off this circuit. GABA is essentially equal to sleepiness, depression, and fatigue. It’s the most widely used inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. And on the other side, we have glutamate, which is excitatory you can associate this with mania, insomnia, just generally higher energy. These kids were more able to stop the scrolling. Both these neurotransmitters are going to be controlled a lot by a genetics, but also a lot by diet. GABA and glutamate enter convert into each other through glutamate decarboxylase and it needs vitamin B6, pyridoxine, to do this.